The Optimist's Daughter
by Eudora Welty
Summary
Judge McKelva is seventy one and has a detached retina, and his daughter Laurel comes down from Chicago to sit with him through the operation in New Orleans. He is told to lie still and not move his eyes. He lies still for weeks and does not recover, and it becomes clear that he has decided not to.
The complication in the room is Fay, the judge's second wife, about thirty years younger, from Texas, who is bored, who says whatever she thinks, and who at the worst possible moment takes hold of him and shakes him. After he dies the two women take his body home to Mount Salus, Mississippi, where the town has views about Fay, and where Fay's relatives arrive for the funeral having previously been described as nonexistent.
The last third is Laurel alone in the empty house with the sewing room, the birds in the chimney and her mother's letters, and this is what the book is actually about. Becky McKelva went blind and died over years and was not gentle at the end, and her daughter has been carrying that since. Laurel was widowed young as well. Nobody in Mount Salus mentions it.
Around two hundred pages, close, unsentimental and very exactly observed, with Welty's ear for how a small town talks doing much of the work.
Best for readers who want a short book about grief that avoids every soft option, and who will notice that the vulgar young wife is treated more justly by the author than by the neighbours.
Historical Context & Significance
The Optimist's Daughter won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Eudora Welty's only Pulitzer, and it came late, after years in which she published little fiction while caring for her mother and brothers, broken by the novel Losing Battles in 1970.
It began as a long story in The New Yorker in March 1969 and she revised it substantially for the book in 1972. She dedicated it to the memory of her mother, Chestina Andrews Welty, who died in 1966, and Becky McKelva's West Virginia girlhood is largely hers.
Welty had been a major writer since the 1940s on the strength of stories such as Why I Live at the P.O. and A Worn Path and novels including Delta Wedding and The Ponder Heart, so the prize read at the time as the establishment catching up. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980, and One Writer's Beginnings, three autobiographical lectures published in 1984, became an unlikely bestseller. She died in Jackson, Mississippi, in 2001 at ninety two.