SOURCE: Schmidt, Peter. “Sibyls in Eudora Welty's Stories.” In Eudora Welty: Eye of the Storyteller, edited by Dawn Trouard, pp. 78–93. Kent: The Kent State University Press, 1989.

In the following essay, Schmidt examines Welty's references to the sibyls of classical mythology—particularly the figure of Medusa—and Welty's place in the canon of women writers who have used sibyls as metaphors for their writing.

she carries a book but it is not the tome of ancient wisdom, 

the pages, I imagine, are the blank pages of the unwritten volume of the new; 

all you say, is implicit, all that and much more; 

but she is not shut up in a cave like a Sibyl … 

she is Psyche, the butterfly, out of the cocoon. 

—H. D.

References to sibyls figure crucially in at least three of Welty's most important stories, “Powerhouse,” “Music from Spain,” and “The Wanderers,” though they may...