I've not read Brad Gooch's new book Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor (Little, Brown & Co., 2009), but the review by Janet Maslin in the NYTimes today has a great quote from some correspondence between F.O. and her friend Betty Hester: " I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both."Gooch's biography supplements the last O'Connor biography, published in 2002 by Jean W. Cash, Flannery O'Connor: A Life (University of Tennessee, 2002), and makes use of a significant amount of hitherto unpublished correspondence. For excerpts from the O'Connor-Hester letters (in the Emory University Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library), see the 2008 article by Christine McCulloch, "Glimpsing Andalusia in the O'Connor-Hester Letters" in the online journal Southern Spaces . Here's a sample:
