SOURCE: “Granny Weatherall: A Life of Quiet Desperation,” in Essays in Arts and Sciences, Vol. 24, October, 1995, pp. 63–76.

In the following essay, French offers a thematic and stylistic analysis of Porter's “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall.”

In the introduction to his collection of critical essays on Katherine Anne Porter, Robert Penn Warren quotes Porter's journal from the year 1936: “‘Now and again thousands of memories converge, harmonize, arrange themselves around a central idea in a coherent form, and I write a story’.” Warren himself goes on to say, “There are thousands of hard facts. We know only a few” (Warren 2). When Porter wrote “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” in 1929, she took a “few facts,” clothed them in memories, and arranged them around a central idea. Therefore, those few facts in this coherent work of literary art must be of great thematic importance and must be read with regard to a...