The Optimist’s Daughter was published by Random House, New York, on 18 May 1972, in a first printing priced at $5.95. An earlier version had appeared in The New Yorker in March 1969; Welty revised and expanded it significantly for the book edition. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1973, Welty’s only major fiction prize despite a career spanning four decades. The novel is Welty’s most autobiographical work and her most disciplined — a compact, devastating meditation on memory, marriage, and the way the living betray the dead.
The Novel
Laurel McKelva Hand, a middle-aged textile designer living in Chicago, flies to New Orleans when her father, Judge Clinton McKelva, a retired Mississippi judge, undergoes eye surgery. His young second wife, Wanda Fay Chisom McKelva — brassy, self-pitying, from a poor Texas family — is also there. The surgery goes well, but the Judge fails to recover; he loses the will to live and dies in the hospital.
Laurel returns to Mount Salus, Mississippi, for the funeral and stays in the family house. In the days before the burial, she confronts Fay’s coarseness, the town’s social rituals of mourning, and — most painfully — her own memories. The novel’s emotional centre is Laurel’s night alone in the house, going through her parents’ things. She finds her mother Becky’s letters and remembers Becky’s long, agonising death from a progressive illness — a death during which the Judge’s optimism (his refusal to acknowledge that Becky was dying) became a form of cruelty.
The novel reaches its climax when Laurel discovers that Fay has been using her dead mother’s breadboard — a handmade object that her husband Phil (killed in the war) had made as a gift. Laurel nearly attacks Fay. She stops herself, recognising that memory cannot be preserved by force — that the past belongs to the living only insofar as they can carry it, and that carrying it means letting it go.
Collecting The Optimist’s Daughter
First edition (1972, Random House): First printing, $5.95.
Identification points:
- Random House colophon
- “First Edition” stated
- Blue cloth binding
- Dust jacket
Approximate market values:
- Fine/Fine in dust jacket: $500–$1,500
- Signed first edition: $1,500–$4,000
- Without jacket: $50–$150
Value trajectory: Stable demand among Welty collectors. The Pulitzer Prize adds lustre. Welty was a gracious signer throughout her long life (she died in 2001 at ninety-two), so signed copies are more available than for many authors of her generation. The novel’s brevity and emotional power make it a favourite among readers who find Welty’s earlier, more baroque fiction challenging. First editions in jacket are not rare but fine copies command respect.
Welty’s Final Statement
The Optimist’s Daughter is the novel in which Welty most directly addressed her own life. The death of Becky McKelva draws on the death of Welty’s own mother, Chestina, in 1966 — a traumatic event that Welty processed for years before she could write about it. The novel’s insight — that optimism can be a form of evasion, that refusing to face suffering is its own kind of cruelty — is hard-won and unsparing. It is one of the great American novels about grief.