The Wide Net and Other Stories was published by Harcourt, Brace in 1943 and is Welty’s second collection — eight stories that move decisively beyond the primarily realistic mode of A Curtain of Green (1941) toward the mythic, the dreamlike, and the archetypal. The Mississippi landscape becomes less a setting than a presence: rivers have consciousness, woods contain spirits, and the line between the natural and the supernatural is permeable.
The Stories
“The Wide Net” — the title story, in which a young husband drags the Pearl River with a seine net, ostensibly searching for his wife (who has threatened to drown herself). The dragging becomes a community ritual, a carnival, a descent into the river’s own consciousness. The wife is found at home, having never left. The story is comic and mythic simultaneously.
“Livvie” — an old man’s young wife encounters spring (literally and figurally) in the form of a young man named Cash. The story moves with the inevitability of seasonal change: winter yielding to spring, age yielding to youth, death yielding to life.
“At the Landing” — a young woman’s sexual awakening, rendered obliquely and mythically. The “landing” is both a physical place (a river landing) and a psychological state. The story’s ending is ambiguous and troubling — submission, violation, or transformation.
“A Still Moment” — three historical figures (John James Audubon, the evangelist Lorenzo Dow, and the murderer James Murrell) converge on the Natchez Trace and see a white heron. Each responds according to his nature: the naturalist shoots it, the preacher praises God, the murderer considers murder. The story is about the incompatibility of different modes of attention.
“First Love” — the young deaf-mute Joel Mayes observes Aaron Burr’s conspiracy trial in Natchez, understanding nothing of the words but everything of the drama.
Method
The stories demonstrate Welty’s movement from the well-made realistic story (O. Henry, Chekhov) toward something more like prose poetry — narratives governed less by causality than by pattern, less by psychology than by rhythm. The influence of myth, of music, and of painting replaces the influence of traditional short-story structure.
Collecting The Wide Net
First edition (Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1943): Green cloth binding. Dust jacket.
Identification points:
- Harcourt, Brace imprint
- “First edition” stated (Harcourt’s “1” on copyright page)
- 214 pages
- Wartime publication
Market values: Fine copies in dust jacket bring $500–$1,200. Wartime paper and a modest first printing make fine copies genuinely uncommon.
Signed copies: $1,000–$2,500.
The collection is valued as the transitional Welty — the book where she moves from the accomplished but relatively conventional stories of her debut toward the deeper, stranger work of The Golden Apples and The Bride of the Innisfallen.