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“... books. This one is 572 pages long and it took the author twenty years to write. Longer than Katherine AnnePorter found to write the whole of her resplendent work. Joan Givner’s book might be called light plane reading, except that it is heartlessly grave, gravid though fruitless, and would take the most ...”

“... It is 1912, and Miranda Gay, one of Katherine AnnePorter’s versions of her younger self, is travelling to a family reunion in South Texas, in the country between Austin and San Antonio. She has made a rash early marriage and alienated herself from her family. She talks to an elderly woman cousin on the train, who bursts out: ‘Ah, the family … the whole hideous institution should be wiped from the face of the earth ...”

“... that her early genius for the piano is fading in adolescence. It bears a peripheral resemblance to Katherine Mansfield’s more poetically, deftly rendered ‘The Wind Blows’, but it’s an excellent story in its own right, the more remarkable for having been written by someone so young. Story also bought another early work, ‘Like That’, but had second ...”

“... distaste for any endeavour that smacks of artifice, Welty was self-made, something which delighted Katherine AnnePorter. ‘She has never studied the writing craft in any college. She has never belonged to a literary group ... Nothing else that I know about her could be more satisfactory to me than this.’ Despite ...”

“... left-wing bohemian circles and consorting with the likes of Hart Crane, Maxwell Perkins, Katherine AnnePorter, Louise Bogan and Edmund Wilson’. The likes of, eh? Still, this helps introduce a rather interesting section on Tate, John Crowe Ransom and the so-called Southern Agrarians. Tate, who was more or ...”

“... literary visitors. A Sunday supper they gave in 1957, for example, was attended by Norman Mailer, Katherine AnnePorter and William Styron.’ The authors call people who want to know this kind of thing ‘literary travellers’ and they plead that such travellers have in the past been handicapped by the lack of a ...”

“... certain kind of woman writer who’s a capital W, capital W. Virginia Woolf certainly was one, and Katherine Mansfield was one.’ McCarthy doesn’t think Eudora Welty is one, but then changes her mind: Welty has ‘become one lately’ (the date of this interview is 1961). Elisabeth Sifton, interviewing, asks McCarthy what happens to turn a woman writer into ...”

“... a kind of demonic self-defeated trickiness that disturbed people. ‘He did not even hate us,’ Katherine AnnePorter wrote when Crane visited her and her husband and got resentfully drunk, ‘for we were nothing to him. He hated and feared himself.’ He found patrons to back and publish his strange poetry, and as ...”

“... writing of some for me, putting lines unwritten by me, in my voice’. Reviewing a biography of Katherine AnnePorter, in 1982, she was clearly drawing on bitter experience:Our power of documentation has a monstrous life of its own, a greater vivacity than any lived existence. It makes form out of particles and finds ...”

“... yourself and yet do not sound conceited’. In 1960, after reading some deeply personal poems by Anne Sexton (which were often compared to Lowell’s), she wrote to Lowell: ‘there is all the difference in the world, I’m afraid, between her kind of simplicity and that of Life Studies, her kind of egocentricity that is simply that, and yours that has been ...”

“... and John Fletcher both died in their mid-forties, Francis Beaumont at thirty, while Henry Porter (whose Two Angry Women of Abingdon influenced The Merry Wives of Windsor) may have been still younger when he was killed in a duel by John Day, another playwright, in 1599. John Lyly, who gave up writing for 15 years to concentrate on his unsuccessful ...”