Eudora Welty’s love affair with Elizabeth Bowen begins to unfold in Welty’s 1951 letter to Bowen after her second visit to Bowen’s ancestral home in County Cork. Bowen’s letters match Welty’s joy in their intimacy. The phrase “love affair,” however, does not appear in their correspondence, in part because it is a simulacrum of their relationship, one initiated by a mutual desire to forge an erotic bond through a visual idiom, polyphonic language, and shared reading. In general, the language defining love fails to describe intimacy beyond the heteronormative binary and outside of the formulaic narrative of impassioned love tethered to sexual expression. In her letters to Bowen and in The Bride of the Innisfallen (1955), the stories she composes during this time, Welty reaches for a language and form to represent her complex palette of desire for Bowen.

Johnston, Carol Ann. Eudora Welty Writing Elizabeth Bowen,Feeling into Words."' Women's Studies (Article published online January 18, 2024). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00497878.2024.2301964

Carol Ann Johnston is a professor of English at Dickinson College.

For more information on the published version, visit Taylor and Francis's Website. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00497878.2024.2301964

Citation