SOURCE: “Mapping the Heart's Home: Doris Betts's ‘The Astronomer,’” in Southern Literary Journal, Vol. 31, No. 1, Fall, 1998, pp. 70–9.

In the following essay, Lang maintains that a “dialectic between faith and doubt has been crucial” to Betts's fiction.

During a publishing career that began in 1954 with The Gentle Insurrection and Other Stories and that has now produced two additional collections of stories and six novels, Doris Betts has steadily become one of the most accomplished southern writers of the last half century. Her fiction is distinguished by its subtle analysis of character, its clarity and grace of style, its moral seriousness, its wit and humor, and—above all—its willingness to address fundamental issues of religious faith and doubt. Those issues include the nature of evil, both moral and physical, and the recognition of the harsh realities of human sinfulness. Though in the past two decades Betts has focused on...