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“... As many letters in The Habit of Being show, Flannery O’Connor was plagued long before her death with Deep Readers from little colleges offering outlandish ‘interpitations’ of her fiction and to some extent her life. If the tendency of British academics has been to demand that short stories must be ‘short Tories’, successful or not according to how strictly they are plotted to deliver a short sharp shock – an early, violent and nastily surprising end – the corresponding vice among their American counterparts has been to require that every short story be a fruitcake of Freudian symbols ...”

“... According​ to one of her cousins, Mary Flannery O’Connor was ‘a very peculiar child’. When she was six, she drew countless pictures of chickens. To discourage classmates from sharing her lunch, she would sometimes take castor oil sandwiches to school. Her own recollection of herself is characteristically acerbic: ‘a pigeon-toed only child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I’ll-bite-you complex ...”

“... The protagonist of ‘The Enduring Chill’, a short story Flannery O’Connor began in the autumn of 1957, is a 25-year-old would-be writer called Asbury Fox, who has been forced to return from Manhattan to the family farm in rural Georgia on account of a mysterious illness from which he believes he is dying ...”

“... and early Fifties, such disparate, talented young writers as Carson McCullers, Truman Capote and Flannery O’Connor were perceived as kindred; there was a highly publicised vogue of American Southern Gothic writing, abetted by photographs of the very camp Truman Capote reclining on a chaise-longue like a delicious dream of Oscar Wilde’s, and by lurid ...”

“... artists would seem to favour a breathing period that is either long or short. Chekhov, Borges, Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver were short-story writers. Dostoevsky, Faulkner and (horrified as he would be to find himself with this lot) Vladimir Nabokov were novelists. If your destiny lies in one form, the other is seldom hospitable. ...”

“... writers of a later time such as McCarthy or Didion. I am reminded especially of the letters of Flannery O’Connor, who was a friend of the Lowells in the Fifties. Both women have a fierce, intelligent, disciplined, Southern Catholic distaste for sentimentality, lies, Northern liberalism and decadence. ...”

“... Pew is less playful than this earlier work and wears its influences, including Ursula Le Guin and Flannery O’Connor, heavily. Pew is like O’Connor in the way a Netflix Shirley Jackson adaptation is like Shirley Jackson – which is to say not very – and its failings are only made more obvious by the ...”

“... lifelike Southern lawyer of the period, a divided figure and a dark gothic construction out of Flannery O’Connor. We can now see him as he was before rewriting turned him holy, before the magic happened, and it’s a shock because the author’s later conception of his purity seems suddenly manufactured and false. Atticus is now less convincing as a ...”

“... in Oxford out of term.One black mark against Larkin is that he no more cares for the work of Flannery O’Connor than Amis did: ‘The day didn’t get off to a very good start by my reading some stories by “Flannery O’Connor” in the bath … horribly depressing American South things.’ This is October ...”

“... habit of art’. I came across it in Mystery and Manners, a book of the incidental writings of Flannery O’Connor: ‘The scientist has the habit of science, the artist the habit of art.’ John, who is more widely (and rigorously) read than I am, had come across the phrase in the correspondence between Stravinsky and Jacques Maritain in the ...”

“... self-evidently annulled? If Ellen Douglas is likely to be read as of roughly the generation of Flannery O’Connor and as a Mississippian who might be compared with the rather older Eudora Welty, her writing expresses a proper wariness of that tradition’s tripwires as well as a preoccupation with its most haunting themes. For there is always the ...”

“... of order. McCarthy has been considered one of the Southern Gothic writers, along with Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor; he shared O’Connor’s religion, having been bred a Roman Catholic. His latest novel marks a departure; the wild country is now the Texas-Mexico border; Eastern Tennessee, with its new ski resorts ...”

“... tinged with the grotesque, that owes something to Anderson’s successors – early Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor, Faulkner. In the 1980s, short fiction established itself as a form appropriate to their subject matter: broken homes, failed marriages, second wives, second chances, missed opportunities and short-term jobs. It exploited the lack of a ...”

“... Freaks and poor people, engaged always in some violent, destructive action,’ was how Flannery O’Connor once described the subjects of her fiction. She claimed that her vision of an American South full of distorted bodies and maimed souls was not grotesque but realistic. ‘The poor love formality, I believe, even better than the wealthy,’ she wrote, ‘but their manners and forms are always being interrupted by necessity ...”

“... Joe to the march of Margaret Mitchell’s carpet-baggers, from Faulkner’s tentacular Snopeses to Flannery O’Connor’s blackhearted preachers. Welty documents the fall (her loss) in a very Protestant way, as something immutable. Degradation and its agents – often heralds of the New South – are to be portrayed, pitied, parsimoniously redeemed, but ...”