The Optimist's Daughter

Eudora Welty’s novel The Optimist’s Daughter was published in 1972 and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction the following year. Welty, who was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1906, originally wrote the The Optimist’s Daughter as a short story for The New Yorker, in which it was published in 1969.

Welty is widely known as a Southern writer because her fiction is derived from the politics, people, and culture of the American South. Before becoming well-known as a writer, Welty worked as a photographer during the Depression for the Works Progress Administration. Her photos featured images of people from various economic backgrounds as they struggled through the Depression. Many of these photographs inspired her writing.

During her accomplished writing career, Welty taught at both Oxford and Cambridge in England, as well as at Harvard University in the United States. During her lifetime, she published 40 stories, five novels, three works of nonfiction, and one children’s book. She is the recipient of many awards, including a Guggenheim and several O’Henry Awards for her short fiction. Her work was widely published in top magazines like The New Yorker and The Sewanee Review, and she was the first living writer to have her works published by the Library of America. Welty died in 2001 and is buried in Jackson, Mississippi. Her headstone is engraved with a quote from The Optimist’s Daughter: “For her life, any life, she had to believe was nothing but the continuity of its love.”

Plot Summary

As the book begins, the main character, Laurel Hand, has traveled from her home in Chicago to New Orleans because her 71-year-old father, Judge Clint McKelva, is losing his eyesight and needs an operation. Laurel, whose mother died (and coincidentally lost her own eyesight), comes to know her father’s new, young wife, Fay, whom she met only once at the brief civil wedding ceremony in her hometown of Mount Salus, Mississippi. Fay is younger than Laurel, and as the two women take turns watching over Judge McKelva over a period of several months, Laurel realizes that Fay is a selfish, narcissistic woman who has cheated on her father and is only after his money. One day, Laurel walks in as Fay is physically abusing her father. After that, Laurel’s father dies, and the two women travel back to Laurel’s childhood home in Mount Salus.

Laurel is comforted by her six “bridesmaids,” friends who also supported her when Laurel’s husband—the love of her life—died in the war. In addition, old family friends provide much needed love and support in the face of Fay’s antagonism and caustic personality. Fay, who told Laurel that she had no family left, turns out to have been lying. During the open-casket visitation in what is now Fay’s home, Fay’s poor relatives arrive from Texas, turning the funeral day into a chaotic and troubling experience. After the funeral, Fay leaves with her Texas family for a respite, and agrees not to return to Mount Salus until Laurel has left three days later.

During the three days that Laurel spends in her childhood home, she attempts to make sense of all that has happened to her. She remembers her mother’s long illness and death. She considers how much love she felt for her husband, a talented architect who enlisted in the Navy during World War II and was killed, his body never recovered. She finds artifacts of her parents’ lives—letters and trinkets—that allow her to come to an understanding about herself and the meaning of love and loss.

In the end, she feels grateful for her friends and is able to make peace with herself and the losses she’s endured. She has found a way to stop living in the past and embrace her present life. After one more run-in with Fay in the kitchen of her childhood home, Laurel returns to Chicago with a newfound sense of completion and self-worth. She may not love her dead father’s choice in a wife, but she has found compassion for herself and an understanding of Fay. Most importantly, Laurel has learned to leave the past behind, accept the grief of her many losses, and discover a way to live serenely in her present life.