Delta Wedding (A Harvest/Hbj Book): A Novel (Harvest/HBJ Book)

A vivid and charming portrait of a large southern family, the Fairchilds, who live on a plantation in the Mississippi delta. The story, set in 1923, is exquisitely woven from the ordinary events of family life, centered around the visit of a young relative, Laura McRaven, and the family's preparations for her cousin Dabney's wedding. The Barnes & Noble Review Perhaps it was the language that drew me in, or the sense of being, like its heroine Laura, expatriate from a southern family. But I read Eudora Welty s Delta Wedding on the porch of a southern town where I was working as a newspaper journalist a half decade ago and never forgot it. At the time I was at a loss to explain its enchantments: In the book, nothing happened, and then nothing happened some more. At long last something was lost, something else found. A few subtle acts of memory and mis-memory took place. In the last five pages, I felt saddened and as if something at once very small and wide had been resettled. Set on the Mississippi Delta in 1923, this story captures the mind and manners of the Fairchilds, a large aristocratic family, self-contained and elusive as the wind. The vagaries of the Fairchilds are keenly observed, and sometimes harshly judged, by nine-year-old Laura McRaven, a Fairchild cousin who takes The Yellow Dog train to the Delta for Dabney Fairchild's wedding. An only child whose mother has just died, Laura is resentful of her boisterous, careless cousins, and desperate for their acceptance. As the hour moves closer and closer to wedding day, Laura arrives at a more subtle understanding of both the Fairchilds and herself. Born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi, Eudora Welty is one of the South's finest novelists. She won a Pulitzer in 1972 for The Optimist's Daughter. Delta Wedding is her best known work. Pretty Dabney Fairchild, only seventeen years old, is marrying her father's overseer. Throughout a long, dreamy week in the Delta, friends and relatives gather to prepare, to gossip, to reminisce, as the tangled vines of blood and memory tighten in a loving, inexorable grasp. In effect, an atmospheric "family album" of snap-shots as they impress the memory of a nineteen-year-old girl who visits the Mississippi delta plantation home of her numerous cousins in 1923 Young Laura spends an exciting week with her cousins, the Fairchilds, at their estate on the Mississippi Delta in the early 1920s