The Optimist's Daughter, by Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty’s 1969 novel The Optimist’s Daughter should be considered a timeless classic. It deals with the complex relationship between a middle-aged daughter and her parents, told with a remarkable artistry that is at once simple and powerful.

Eudora Welty (1909-2001) was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and is well known as a Southern contemporary writer. She wrote short stories, literary criticism and novels, also publishing a book of her photographs in 1971. Of the five novels she wrote during her long life, The Optimist’s Daughter was her last, published in 1969.

This reviewer is not intimately aquainted with the work of Ms Welty, having only read her rich and strange novella Moon Lake (1949). Although I found that particular work by turns bizarre, curious and generally beyond interpretation, it was compelling enough to get me to re-read immediately. Welty’s prose in Moon Lake is light, rarefied and exquisitely ornate, without being merely decorative or pretty. She writes in this way, one gets the impression, because it is a true reflection of her soul. What may appear artifice on first read, it turns out on re-reading, is a deep authenticity.

The Optimist’s Daughter comes some 30 years after Moon Lake was published, and it’s interesting to note stylistic differences and similarities. The light and delicate tone is there, as is the unerring ability to capture mood and troubled psychological interiors, but the air of strangeness is gone. This is very much Welty telling a‘straight’ story of loss and grief, in what seems a piece of autobiography. As you read this, in many ways devastating story, you get the impression that Welty is writing to heal personal wounds. This sense of honesty, tempered as it is by such controlled and dignified prose, makes The Optimist’s Daughter a literary classic. Written over40 years ago, the novel hasn’t dated. Every page positively breathes a life of its own.

The title is ironic. The optimist of the story is Judge McKelva, who must undergo surgery for his eye. Being of an advanced age, his daughter Laurel is naturally enough concerned about her father’s welfare. He tries to allay fears, insisting that’s he’s always been an optimist. But his resigned attitude to the surgery makes it seem that he’s not an optimist at all, but a fatalist who expects the worst. Judge McKelva has a second wife, the shrewish and selfish Wanda Fay. Her silly attitude and foolish opinions causes tensions with the optimist’s daughter, Laurel.

This is a short novel of 180 pages, divided into four parts. Part one deals with Judge McKelva in hospital, part two shows Laurel back at her father’s house deep in grief and battling her mother-in-law, part three describes Laurel reflecting on her past while going through the artifacts in her father’s house, including details of her relationship with her biological mother, Becky, and part four wraps things up.

In the end, it’s hard to say exactly what The Optimist’s Daughter is about. It feels like a child’s meditation on the lives of her parents, and how their influence created a thoughtful and troubled daughter. It’s about the hothouse atmosphere parents can create for their children, and how it's impossible to escape the past, as it forms our very being. Eudora Welty achieves all this in a novel that skillfullybalances intense family drama against personal introspection and reflection. The Optimist’s Daughter shows how life bruises and alienates us, and how we limp along nonetheless.

The Optimist’s Daughter, by Eudora Welty. Published by Virago. ISBN:978-0-86068-375-9