SOURCE: "Wafts of the South," in TLS, No. 4767, August 12, 1994, pp. 20-1.

In the following review, Shields discusses three books: a biography of Eudora Welty, a collection of her book reviews, and her novel The Optimist's Daughter.

Eudora Welty was born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi, where she still lives. This stern rootedness has always compounded the wonderment in Miss Welty's admirers, for there is, first, her long list of writing accomplishments to contemplate, and then an accompanying respect for her serene, unwriterly willingness to stay put. She is, in a sense, a curiosity in American literary history, a writer who stayed home, who has lived, in fact, in the same house she moved to with her family when she was a girl of sixteen.

Her five novels, her dozens of short stories and essays, and her fine memoir One Writer's Beginnings, all found their sense and shape in an...