SOURCE: “‘A Little Stolen Holiday’: Katherine Anne Porter's Narrative of the Woman Artist,” in Women's Studies, Vol. 25, No. 1, November, 1995, pp. 73–93.

In the following essay, Titus considers Porter's depiction of the female artist in “Holiday.”

According to Katherine Anne Porter's friend, Robert Penn Warren, the “alienation of the artist” occurs as a “basic theme,” “implicit, over and over” in her fiction and “finds something close to explicit statement” in her story, “Holiday” (Warren 11). Warren's suggestion, made almost fifteen years ago, points toward a central concern of this beautiful, neglected story.¹ In “Holiday” Katherine Anne Porter depicts the alienation of the woman artist in a culture that advocates motherhood, not authorhood, as a woman's natural and ideal achievement. The story was a painful one for Porter to write, not just because its subject was extremely important to her, but also because it was rooted in two deeply troubling personal experiences...