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Studies on autobiography and self-presentation have taken a new direction with the publication of different edited collections on the correspondence of literary women. Two outstanding examples are Pamela Matthews’s Perfect Companionship: Ellen Glasgow’s Selected Correspondence with Women (2005) and Suzanne Marrs’s What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell (2011). In “Letter-Writing, Authorship, and Southern Women Modernists,” included in The Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South (2016), Will Brantley examines four edited collections of letters which include The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor, edited by Sally Fitzgerald (1979); Letters of Katherine Anne Porter, edited by Isabel Bayley (1990); How Am I to Be Heard? Letters of Lillian Smith, edited by Margaret Rose Gladney (1993); and Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, edited by Carla Kaplan (2003). In his groundbreaking essay, Brantley shows that letters “are a revelatory mode of self-writing . . . because they can provide a sense of immediacy often missing in autobiography” (345). Because of the episodic nature of letters, Brantley writes, and despite changes of self over time, “for a reader [they] may be as true to the writer’s lived experience as the self-summation of the more formal autobiography” (345). Brantley, therefore, concludes that letters “are, as [Katherine Anne] Porter maintained, autobiography in a pure sense” (358).

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