SOURCE: “The Achievement of the Miranda Stories,” in Katherine Anne Porter's Artistic Development: Primitivism, Traditionalism, and Totalitarianism, Louisiana State University Press, 1993, pp. 146–81.

In the following essay, Brinkmeyer traces Porter's growing interest in familial identity and Southern heritage and determines its effect on her fiction.

Katherine Anne Porter's developing interest in memory and the southern tradition signaled a profound fascination with her upbringing and family, immediate and ancestral. Her relationship with her family, particularly with her father, had been and would always remain ambivalent and strained, with her feelings fluctuating wildly, from outright scorn to nostalgic affection. Even during the late teens and early twenties when Porter was portraying herself as a fashionable rebel who had freed herself from and turned her back on her family, she nonetheless frequently sent endearing letters back home. In a Christmas letter dated December 21, 1916, to her father, she wrote, referring to her life...