Justified True Belief

(●) A Georgia storyteller who wrote violent, funny stories about grace, and meant every word of the theology underneath them. + Flannery O’Connor published two short novels and twenty-seven stories in her lifetime, most of them written at a farmhouse desk facing a blank wall, and she was dead at thirty-nine. That is a small body of work by any measure. It is also, by fairly wide agreement, some of the finest American fiction of the twentieth century, and it is all about one thing: what happens to a person who does not want God when God turns up anyway. She matters to Christian apologetics for a reason that has nothing to do with her being a famous Christian who wrote novels. O’Connor thought hard, on paper, about a problem apologists face every day. What do you do when the person you are talking to does not share a single one of your assumptions, and does not think the question is interesting enough to argue about? Her answer was not a better argument. It was a shock: a grandmother shot in a ditch, a boy drowning himself in a river to be baptized, a woman who hears the word “hog” and finally sees herself. She wrote comedy, and she wrote it about damnation and mercy, and she insisted the two went together. One detail a reader tends to remember. She spent her last thirteen years at her mother’s dairy farm, on crutches from 1955 onward, writing two hours a morning because that was all the lupus would allow. Lupus is a disease in which the body’s own defenses turn and attack its healthy tissue, the joints, the skin, the kidneys, whatever they reach. There was no cure for it then, and there is none now. The rest of the day belonged to the farm and to her birds. She raised peafowl in the yard, and by 1961 she had, as she put it, forty beaks to feed.

(●) 1925 AD: Born in Savannah, the only child of a Catholic family in a Protestant South. + Mary Flannery O’Connor was born on 25 March 1925 in Savannah, Georgia, to Edward Francis O’Connor, who sold real estate, and Regina Cline O’Connor, whose family had been in middle Georgia for generations. The house stood on Lafayette Square, across from the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist, and the parish school she attended was a short walk away. Catholics were a small minority in the Georgia of the 1920s and 30s, fewer than one person in a hundred, and she grew up knowing exactly what it felt like to hold a faith her neighbors found strange. That position, inside Christianity and outside the local version of it, turned out to be the best seat in the house for a novelist. The most famous thing that happened to her as a child involved a chicken. She owned a buff Cochin Bantam that could walk backward as well as forward, word of it got around, and Pathé News, which made the newsreels that ran in cinemas before the feature, sent a photographer down from New York to film the bird. She was five. “When I was five,” she wrote years later, “I had an experience that marked me for life.” The newsreel survives. A small girl in a white dress holds a hen, and the caption tells the audience that this odd fowl walks backward to go forward so she can look behind to see where she went. She dropped the “Mary” when she began publishing. Flannery, she thought, sounded less like somebody’s Irish washerwoman and more like a writer.

(●) 1941 AD: Lupus killed her father when she was fifteen, and the same disease was already waiting for her. + Edward O’Connor was diagnosed in 1937 with systemic lupus erythematosus, to give the disease its full name, and in the 1930s there was nothing a doctor could do about it. In 1938 he took a job in Atlanta appraising property for the new Federal Housing Administration, and the family went with him, but the city did not suit them. The next year Regina brought her daughter back to the Cline house in Milledgeville, the old state capital of Georgia. He stayed at the work from a distance as long as he could hold it, and gave it up and followed them only in 1940, when his health left him no choice. He died in that house on 1 February 1941. She was fifteen, and she almost never wrote about it directly. Life closed over the loss the way life does. She finished Peabody High School in 1942, went on to the Georgia State College for Women, and came out in June 1945 with a degree earned in an accelerated wartime program. What she was known for on campus was not her prose. She drew cartoons, cutting them into linoleum blocks and printing them for the student paper: stiff, deadpan, faintly hostile drawings of college girls, with captions that landed like a slap. The eye that made those cartoons is the eye that made the stories. She saw the ridiculous thing a person does and drew it exactly, without softening it, and let the reader decide whether to laugh.

(●) 1945 AD: At the Iowa Writers’ Workshop she learned her trade and kept a prayer journal nobody saw for sixty-six years. + She arrived at the University of Iowa in 1945 on a scholarship in journalism and quickly decided she wanted the writing program instead. The director, Paul Engle, told the story afterward: a young woman came into his office, said something he could not understand a word of, and, when he asked her to write it down, put on his pad, “My name is Flannery O’Connor. I am not a journalist. Can I come to the Writer’s Workshop?” Middle Georgia was a foreign country to an Iowa ear. She took the master of fine arts in 1947, submitting a collection of stories as her thesis, and stayed on another year. At the same time, in a nickel notebook, she was writing prayers. They were published in 2013 as A Prayer Journal, and they are the least guarded thing she ever wrote: a young writer asking God to make her good at the one thing she wanted, and then catching herself wanting it for the wrong reasons. “I do not know You God because I am in the way,” she wrote. “Please help me to push myself aside.” She was twenty, and she had already located the problem she would spend the rest of her life writing about. The years that followed were the only stretch of her adult life away from Georgia. She spent the summer of 1948 at Yaddo, the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, where the poet Robert Lowell took her up and told everyone he knew about her. In 1949 she moved in with the translator Robert Fitzgerald and his wife Sally in Ridgefield, Connecticut, paying her way by minding their children, and worked on the novel that became Wise Blood.

(●) 1950 AD: She boarded a train home for Christmas and never lived anywhere but her mother’s farm again. + In December 1950 she said goodbye to Sally Fitzgerald at the station looking much as usual. When the train reached Georgia, the uncle who met her said she looked like a shriveled old woman. It was lupus, the disease that had killed her father, and the doctors said so, but they said it to her mother. Regina O’Connor, who had watched a husband die of it, decided the news would finish her daughter and told her instead that she had rheumatoid arthritis. O’Connor did not learn the real name of what she had until the summer of 1952. So she came home, and home she stayed. Mother and daughter moved out to Andalusia, the Cline family dairy farm a few miles north of Milledgeville: a white farmhouse with a screened porch, a pond, hired hands milking cows, and a downstairs room fitted up for a woman who could no longer manage stairs. She wrote every morning for about two hours, which was as much as the disease and the drugs left her, and she was ferociously disciplined about it. The rest of the day she answered letters, read, watched the farm, and went in to Mass when she was able. It looks from the outside like a narrowing. She did not experience it that way, and the letters from these years are some of the funniest in American literature. A woman with a fatal illness, living with her mother, in a town of eleven thousand people, writing about peacocks and the neighbors, was doing the best work of her life.

(●) 1952 AD: Her first novel, Wise Blood, appeared, and almost nobody could tell whose side she was on. + Wise Blood follows Hazel Motes, a young army veteran who comes back to Tennessee determined to prove there is nothing to be saved from, and founds a street-corner church of his own: the Church Without Christ, where the blind do not see, the lame do not walk, and what is dead stays that way. He spends the book running from a Jesus he does not believe in. At the end, having killed a man, he fills his shoes with broken glass and blinds himself with quicklime, and the reader is left to work out whether this is madness or repentance. Reviewers in 1952 mostly settled on madness. They filed the book under Southern grotesque, which was the critics’ name for fiction out of the region that deals in the deformed, the violent and the half-mad. They admired the sentences. And they assumed the author shared her characters’ nihilism, the view that nothing means anything. Ten years later she put the record straight in a note for the second edition, and it is worth having her exact words. “That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence.” The novel, she said, was a comic one about a Christian malgré lui, French for “in spite of himself”: a man dragged to faith backward, kicking. Freedom, she added, is not a simple thing, and a novel can only deepen the mystery of it. She had told them what the book was. It would take the better part of two decades for most of her readers to believe her.

(●) 1955 AD: A Good Man Is Hard to Find made her famous, the drugs that kept her alive put her on crutches, and she bought peacocks. + A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories came out in 1955, and the title story is the one everybody knows: a family on a car trip, a grandmother who cannot stop talking, and an escaped convict called The Misfit who kills all of them in a ditch beside a dirt road. In the last moment of her life the grandmother reaches out to touch the murderer and calls him one of her own babies, and he shoots her three times in the chest. Then he delivers the judgment on her that gives the story its sting: she would have been a good woman, if there had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life. The treatment that held the lupus off was ACTH, a hormone injected to drive her own adrenal glands into making cortisone, the steroid that damps the body’s attack on itself. It saved her life, and it softened her bones while it did it. By 1955 her hips could not carry her and she was on aluminum crutches, which she used for the rest of her life and made jokes about constantly. None of it kept her home. She gave more than sixty lectures at colleges and writers’ groups, hobbling onto stages to explain, with enormous patience and no visible piety, what she thought fiction was for. The peafowl were her one extravagance. A crate of them came up by railway express from Eustis, Florida, one mild October around 1952, and the flock kept growing until, as she wrote in 1961, she had forty beaks to feed. They ate her mother’s flowers and screamed at night and were worth it. A peacock who turns and faces you, she said, shows a green-bronze arch around him, a galaxy of gazing haloed suns. The work went on through all of it. Her second novel, The Violent Bear It Away, came in 1960, and she took its title from the Bible she had grown up on, the Douay-Rheims, the English translation Catholics had used for generations before the modern ones: from the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away. The English Standard Version renders the verse, "From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force" (Matthew 11:12).

(●) 1964 AD: She died at thirty-nine, writing in a notebook she kept hidden under her hospital pillow. + In February 1964 surgeons removed a fibroid tumor, a benign growth in the wall of the womb. The operation itself was routine. What came after it was not: surgery can wake lupus out of a quiet stretch, everyone involved knew it might, and this time it did. She spent the spring and the summer in and out of hospitals in Milledgeville and Atlanta, and she spent those months trying to finish the stories for one more collection. The novelist Caroline Gordon, who had been line-editing her drafts since 1951, visited her in the hospital a few weeks before the end. The doctors had forbidden her to work. Gordon reported that O’Connor had established that a little fiction was allowed, and then drew a notebook out from under her pillow. What she was writing in it was “Parker’s Back,” the story of a man who has a Byzantine Christ tattooed across his shoulders and is beaten for it by his wife, who calls it idolatry. She died of kidney failure at Baldwin County Hospital in Milledgeville on 3 August 1964, at thirty-nine, and was buried at Memory Hill Cemetery beside her father, whom the same disease had taken twenty-three years before. The books kept coming without her. Everything That Rises Must Converge, the collection she had been racing to finish, appeared the following year. Then, in 1971, her publisher gathered all thirty-one of her stories into one volume, the apprentice work included, and that book won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1972, nearly eight years after her death.

What She Taught

(T1) Grace has to arrive violently, because the people it comes to have gone deaf. + Think about what you do when you are talking to someone who cannot hear well. You do not use more words, and you do not choose better ones. You raise your voice. If the person also cannot see, you do not hand them a delicate sketch; you draw the thing big, in thick black lines, and you hold it up close. Nobody calls this rude. It is what love does when the ordinary channel is blocked. That is O’Connor’s whole theory of her own violence, and it is worth noticing that it is a theory about her audience rather than about her characters. A writer who can assume that readers already believe what she believes may work in hints and half-tones, because the hints land. She could assume no such thing. Her readers, as she saw them, did not reject Christianity so much as file it under things of no great consequence, somewhere near table manners. Against that, a gentle story of quiet faith is not modest, it is inaudible. So she shouted. A grandmother meets a murderer, a boy walks into a river, a Bible salesman steals a woman’s wooden leg, and in the wreckage of the moment a character sees, for the first and possibly the only time, what she actually is. Two things follow, and both matter for anyone who tries to commend the faith to a neighbor. The first is that the shock is never the point; the seeing is. The second is that her characters almost never want it. “All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it,” she wrote to a correspondent, “but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless, brutal, etc.” (The Habit of Being, p. 275). The hardness is the door. Grace is what comes through it.

(Q) "When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock: to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures." + Source: Flannery O’Connor, “The Fiction Writer & His Country,” in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (1969). She is answering critics who complained that her stories were freakish and unpleasant. The answer is that the freakishness is a measurement of the distance between the writer and the reader, not a taste of hers. Her original sentence uses a dash where the colon stands here.

(T2) The South is not Christ-centered, but it is Christ-haunted, and a haunted man is not a free man. + A haunted house is not a house with a ghost politely living in it. It is a house where something that will not leave keeps making itself felt: a door that opens, a step on the stair, an atmosphere that puts everyone on edge. O’Connor thought her region was like that about Jesus of Nazareth. The Georgia she lived in was not obeying him, and it was certainly not organized around him, but it could not get free of him either. The backwoods preacher, the tent revival, the grandmother who quotes Scripture while she lies, her own Hazel Motes founding a church to prove there is nothing to be saved from: these are not portraits of belief. They are portraits of people who cannot make the subject go away. What she saw in that is the reason she is useful far outside Georgia. A person who has genuinely never heard of Christ is one kind of case. A person who has heard, has declined, and still finds the question following him down the road is another kind entirely, and that second person is far more common than the first in any culture that Christianity has passed through. He does not need to be informed. He needs to be made to look at what he is already carrying. She added the sentence that gives the idea its teeth. The Southerner who is not convinced he was made in the image and likeness of God is very much afraid that he may have been. Fear, in O’Connor, is a form of knowledge. Her characters are frightened of exactly the thing they claim not to believe.

(Q) "While the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted. The Southerner, who isn’t convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God." + Source: Flannery O’Connor, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” a lecture of about 1960, collected in Mystery and Manners. She is explaining to a room of literature students why Southern writers keep producing characters other regions find freakish. The answer she gives is theological: a writer who still believes human beings are made in God’s image has a standard by which a person can be seen to be distorted, and a writer with no such standard has only variety. The contraction and the comma after “Southerner” are as the text prints them.

(T3) Settled doctrine does not narrow what a writer can see; it is the instrument she sees with. + Here is an objection O’Connor heard constantly, and you may have heard a version of it yourself: a person who has already signed up to a creed cannot look at the world honestly, because the answers are decided in advance. Believe in hell and you will see sinners everywhere. Believe in redemption and you will tidy up every ending. Art needs an open mind, and dogma closes it. Dogma, in her vocabulary, means the settled teaching a church holds and does not put up for renegotiation: that God became man, that he died and rose, that the bread and the wine are what he said they are. Her reply to the objection is that such teaching works the way a microscope works. A microscope is a fixed instrument. Its lenses are ground to a specification and cannot be argued with, and that fixity is precisely why it shows you the pond water in detail instead of a smear. The writer who knows that a human being is an immortal soul with a destiny is not thereby prevented from seeing a fat, rude, self-satisfied woman in a doctor’s waiting room. She is enabled to see how much is at stake in her. You can test the claim on the work itself, which is the honest way to test it. O’Connor’s Catholicism did not produce edifying stories about nice believers. It produced adulterers, murderers, con men, and a great many church people who are worse than the criminals, because the doctrine she held says that respectability is no protection at all. Elsewhere in the same essay she says Christian dogma is about the only thing left in the world that surely guards and respects mystery. The creed, in other words, is what stopped her from explaining her characters away.

(Q) "There is no reason why fixed dogma should fix anything that the writer sees in the world. On the contrary, dogma is an instrument for penetrating reality." + Source: Flannery O’Connor, “Catholic Novelists and Their Readers,” in Mystery and Manners. The essay is addressed to her fellow Catholics, and much of it is a complaint about them: readers who wanted fiction that would make faith look attractive, and were embarrassed when hers did not. Her position is that the novelist’s first loyalty is to the concrete world as it is, and that the creed is what makes the concrete world worth that much attention.

(T4) If the bread of the Lord’s Supper is only a symbol, it is not worth having. + Some years before she wrote the letter, O’Connor had been taken to a dinner party in New York by Robert Lowell, at the house of the novelist Mary McCarthy, who had been raised Catholic and had left. O’Connor was twenty-something, out of her depth, and said almost nothing for hours. Toward morning the talk turned to the Eucharist, the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper, and the Catholic at the table was expected to say something. McCarthy remarked that as a child she had thought of the Host, which is the consecrated bread of the Mass, as the Holy Ghost, and that now she thought of it as a symbol, and a pretty good one. What O’Connor said back has become the single most quoted sentence of her letters, and it was not an argument. She said it in a shaking voice, by her own account, and then she was done. But she knew what she had defended. A symbol stands for something that is somewhere else. If the church’s central act is a well-designed reminder of an absent person, then the reminder is a courtesy, and courtesies are optional. Her position was that it is either the thing itself or nothing worth getting up early for. Christians divide here, and the division is old and serious. Reformed Protestants have understood the bread and the cup as a sign and a seal, something through which Christ is truly received by faith, rather than as a change in the elements themselves. Lutherans, Anglicans, the Orthodox and Rome all describe the presence in stronger terms, and they differ among themselves about how to state it. Across the free churches, since the Swiss reformer Huldrych Zwingli, many have taken the Supper as a remembering that Christ himself commanded. Set all of that beside what McCarthy said at the table, though, and the family resemblance is hard to miss. Every one of those traditions holds that the table is Christ’s own appointment, and that the church is not free to treat it as a pleasant figure of speech. The argument among Christians is over how he gives himself there. Even the plainest memorial view is answering a command rather than admiring a metaphor.

(Q) "Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it. That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable." + Source: The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor, edited by Sally Fitzgerald (1979), letter to “A.” of 16 December 1955. “A.” was Betty Hester, an Atlanta file clerk whose name was withheld at her own request until after her death; the correspondence with her is the richest in the book. O’Connor is recounting the dinner party at Mary McCarthy’s some five or six years earlier, and she is not proud of her performance. The point of telling it is her discovery that she had nothing further to add, and did not need anything further.

(T5) Sickness is a place you are sent, and being sent there is a mercy. + People who are seriously ill often say that the strangest part is not the pain but the emigration. You have moved. Everyone you love is still in the old country, sending letters, and they cannot come where you are, and there is no return ticket. O’Connor, who had watched her father go and then followed him, described it exactly that way, and then said the thing that stops a reader cold: that the trip is more instructive than a long journey through Europe, and that people who never take it miss one of God’s mercies. This is not a woman making the best of it, and it is not a claim that suffering is good. She hated the disease, complained about it cheerfully and often, and told one correspondent flatly that she had never been anywhere but sick. The claim is narrower and harder. Death is coming for everyone, and most people arrange their lives so as not to look at it. An illness that will not let you stop looking has given you, at ruinous cost, information that the healthy spend a great deal of energy avoiding. It is worth setting her ordinary days beside the sentence, because the sentence would be unbearable coming from someone comfortable. She wrote on crutches, two hours a morning, at a farmhouse desk facing a blank wall so there would be nothing to look at. She kept up a correspondence that runs to six hundred pages in print. She raised birds. She went to Mass. And at the very end, forbidden to work, she wrote a story in a notebook under the pillow. Whatever she meant by mercy, she was not theorizing.

(Q) "In a sense sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it’s always a place where there’s no company, where nobody can follow. Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don’t have it miss one of God’s mercies." + Source: The Habit of Being, letter of 28 June 1956. She was thirty-one and five and a half years into the lupus when she wrote it. The tone of the letters on either side of it is worth noticing: brisk, funny, entirely without self-pity, and then a sentence like this one dropped in among the news from the farm.

(Q) "I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in its relation to that." + Source: Flannery O’Connor, “The Fiction Writer & His Country,” in Mystery and Manners. She wrote this for a 1957 symposium in which American novelists were asked what they thought of their country, published that year as The Living Novel. Everyone else discussed the culture. She said, in effect, that the question of what she thought she was looking at had to be settled before the question of what she saw, and then told them exactly where she was standing. It is the plainest statement she ever made of the position that all the stories are written from, and it is the reason Christians of every description went on to claim her.

What Christian Readers Made of Her

(†) Her first readers took the violence for despair, and it took a generation to hear what she was saying. + In the 1950s the standard verdict was that a gifted young Southerner was writing about degenerates. Critics put her in with the Southern Gothic writers, praised the prose, and treated the theology as local color, something the characters had rather than something the author believed. She spent a great deal of her short life correcting this, patiently, in lecture after lecture, and the lectures are why we have Mystery and Manners at all. Some readers heard her at once. Caroline Gordon, a Catholic novelist thirty years her senior, went over her manuscripts line by line from 1951 onward and told her when a sentence was doing nothing. Robert Giroux published her, and once he had her he stayed her editor. Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk, a member of an order that keeps silence and rises in the night to pray, and his autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain had sold a million copies. After she died he said that he would not compare her with good writers like Hemingway, Porter and Sartre, but with someone like Sophocles. He set down her name with honor, he wrote, for all the truth and all the craft with which she shows man’s fall and his dishonor. Giroux quoted the tribute in his introduction to The Complete Stories. The verdict turned in public in 1972, when that collection won the National Book Award for Fiction, awarded to a woman nearly eight years dead. By 1988 she was in the Library of America, the series that keeps the American classics in print, and the reading that treats her Christianity as ornament had quietly disappeared.

(†) Protestants took up a thoroughly Catholic writer, and she has been read across Christendom ever since. + This was not the obvious outcome. O’Connor was a daily-Mass Catholic who read Thomas Aquinas before bed and thought the Eucharist was the center of existence (T4). Her Protestant readers were people who disagreed with her about several of those things. They read her anyway, and kept reading her, for a reason worth naming: her fiction is full of Protestants, drawn from the inside and drawn with respect. The backwoods prophets of The Violent Bear It Away are fanatics, and they are also right about the thing that matters, which is more than can be said for the reasonable schoolteacher trying to cure them. Ralph C. Wood, a Baptist who taught for years at Baylor University, wrote a full-length study of her under the title Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South. Rowan Williams, then Archbishop of Canterbury, gave her a lecture of her own in Grace and Necessity, his book on Catholic thought and modern art. Her essays turn up on seminary reading lists and in writing programs, and the reason is the same in both places: she is the clearest guide in English to how a Christian makes art that is not propaganda. What travels across the traditions is the double conviction under all of it. The world is really fallen, so a story that ends nicely is a lie. And grace is really at work in it, so a story that ends in despair is also a lie. Almost every Christian tradition can sign both halves, whatever it thinks about the bread.

(†) Where she fell short: her letters carried the racial contempt her fiction condemned. + The honest ledger has this in it, and it comes from her own hand rather than from anyone’s later reading of her. O’Connor corresponded with the playwright Maryat Lee from the start of 1957 until a month before she died, and those letters are where her guard is lowest. When Lee proposed bringing the novelist James Baldwin to meet her in Georgia, she refused: in New York it would be nice to meet him, she wrote in April 1959, here it would not, and she added that she observed the traditions of the society she fed on. On 3 May 1964, three months before she died, she wrote to Lee that she was an integrationist by principle and a segregationist by taste. To another correspondent she called topical material poison in fiction, and said she had got away with it in “Everything That Rises Must Converge” only because on the race business she says a plague on everybody’s house. Other letters speak of the Black farmhands at Andalusia in the belittling tone a white Georgian of her generation was raised to use, and no amount of admiration for the fiction makes those sentences read any better. Two things have to be said next, and neither cancels the other. The first is that her stories are merciless toward precisely this sin. Mrs. Turpin in “Revelation” sorts her neighbors by color and class in a doctor’s waiting room, and is given a vision of a bridge of souls swinging up to heaven with the people she despised in front and her own respectable sort bringing up the rear, their virtues burning away as they go. Julian’s mother in “Everything That Rises Must Converge” offers a penny to a Black child and is knocked flat for it. The judgment in the fiction is not partial; it falls on the white racial pride her letters sometimes indulged. The second is that the standard by which the letters fail is the one she herself confessed. Scripture puts it without any room to move: "My brothers, show no partiality as you hold the faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory" (James 2:1), and "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28). She knew the texts. She wrote a story in which a proud woman is shown heaven with her own sort at the back of the procession, and then wrote letters from the middle of that procession. Her readers are entitled to say so, and she, of all people, would have understood the point being made: a person can see the thing clearly in a story and still be the last to recognize himself in it.