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What would you make out about me just from reading "Good Country People"? Plenty, but not the whole story.
-FLANNERY O'CONNOR, The Habit of Being
THE YEAR 2004 MARKED the fortieth anniversary of Flannery O'Connor's death from kidney failure brought on from her years of fighting the effects of lupus, in midcentury a debilitating disease and difficult to survive. The intervening time since her death has seen an explosion of critical and popular enthusiasm for her work, so much so that in 1988 she achieved canonical status in American arts and letters with the publication of her Collected Works by the Library of America. In the fall of 2003 an international symposium, the fifth of its kind, was held in O'Connor's hometown of Milledgeville, Georgia. It brought together over two hundred scholars and enthusiasts, including novelists, poets, and other artists who have acknowledged O'Connor's influence on their work.
Readers have been fascinated by this very private woman's stories, as well as by her life. Much of what is known about O'Connor's personal life is revealed in Sally Fitzgerald's award-winning edition of the writer's letters to friends and admirers, The Habit of Being (1979). These letters reveal the intelligence, wit, and religious sensibility of a writer proud of both her southern heritage and her Roman Catholic faith. Arranged chronologically, the letters give a sense of O'Connor's personal development as an artist and offer insight into her personality. What they do not provide, however, is an account of romantic interest in her life. Many critics have assumed that her physical condition, compromised after the onset of lupus in her twenties, precluded her forming-even hoping to form-deep attachments with men.
"Good Country People" (1955), one of O'Connor's most successful and most anthologized stories, centers on the maimed Joy Hopewell, fitted with a wooden leg as the result of a childhood accident. She has officially changed her name to Hulga to reflect the ugliness she feels about life and to spite her mother. Hulga, who has a doctorate in philosophy and displays a disdain for her mother's southern, Christian manners, lives as an aloof recluse on the family farm. One day she has an encounter with a disarming Bible salesman named Manley Pointer, a rustic Lothario who is attracted...