SOURCE: “Reading the Endings in Katherine Anne Porter's ‘Old Mortality,’” in Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender and Narrative Closure, edited by Alison Booth, University Press of Virginia, 1993, pp. 280–99.

In the following essay, Jones discusses Porter's treatment of feminist issues in Old Mortality.

I won't have false hopes, I won't be romantic about myself. I can't live in their world any longer, she told herself, listening to the voices back of her. Let them tell their stories to each other. Let them go on explaining how things happened. I don't care. At least I can know the truth about what happens to me, she assured herself silently, making a promise to herself, in her hopefulness, her ignorance.

With these final sentences of Old Mortality (1937), Katherine Anne Porter qualifies the progress eighteen-year-old Miranda has made toward self-knowledge and sophisticated reading strategies. This long story is a bildungsroman of sorts...