SOURCE: “A Matter of Quality,” in The Nation, Vol. 141, October 30, 1935, p. 517.

In the following essay, Troy offers a favorable review of Flowering Judas and Other Stories.

In the five years that have passed since the almost surreptitious publication of Flowering Judas Miss Porter has apparently written only four stories which she believes worthy of being included in the same collection. With such a record, obviously, this writer can hardly expect to attain to the Titanic company of those recent fictionists who have been busily demonstrating the superiority of matter over mind in literary production. She offers no panoramic survey of modern society, no saga of the American or any other soil, no documentary materials for a study in the elephantiasis of the literary sensibility in our time. She cannot successfully be compared with Balzac, Tolstoy, or Proust—and Rabelais is quite out of the question. Confronted with Miss...