Afterword: Elizabeth Spencer: Mississippi Literary Trail Marker

CARROLLTON, MISSISSIPPI, OCTOBER 5, 2019 I was pleased recently to participate in a special occasion that honored Elizabeth Spencer’s major contribution to the literary legacy of Mississippi and to the national achievement in letters. She is a daughter of Carrollton, Mississippi, and one can say she has carried Carrollton in her imagination throughout her life. The early novels, Fire in the Morning and This Crooked Way, had southern settings that Spencer knew well, the South of her childhood ..

Composing Selves: Southern Women and Autobiography

In Composing Selves, award-winning author Peggy Whitman Prenshaw provides the most comprehensive treatment of autobiographies by women in the American South. This long-anticipated addition to Prenshaw\u27s study of southern literature spans the twentieth century as she provides an in-depth look at the life-writing of eighteen women authors.Composing Selves travels the wide terrain of female life in the South, analyzing various issues that range from racial consciousness to the deflection of personal achievement. All of the authors presented came of age during the era Prenshaw refers to as the late southern Victorian period, which began in 1861 and ended in the 1930s. Belle Kearney\u27s A Slaveholder\u27s Daughter (1900) with Elizabeth Spencer\u27s Landscapes of the Heart and Ellen Douglas\u27s Truth: Four Stories I Am Finally Old Enough to Tell (both published in 1998) chronologically bookend Prenshaw\u27s survey.She includes Ellen Glasgow\u27s The Woman Within, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings\u27s Cross Creek, Bernice Kelly Harris\u27s Southern Savory, and Zora Neale Hurston\u27s Dust Tracks on a Road. The book also examines Katharine DuPre Lumpkin\u27s The Making of a Southerner and Lillian Smith\u27s Killers of the Dream.In addition to exploring multiple themes, Prenshaw considers a number of types of autobiographies, such as Helen Keller\u27s classic The Story of My Life and Anne Walter Fearn\u27s My Days of Strength. She treats narratives of marital identity, as in Mary Hamilton\u27s Trials of the Earth, and calls attention to works by women who devoted their lives to social and political movements, like Virginia Durr\u27s Outside the Magic Circle.Drawing on many notable authors and on Prenshaw\u27s own life of scholarship, Composing Selves provides an invaluable contribution to the study of southern literature, autobiography, and the work of southern women writers.https://repository.lsu.edu/facultybooks/1449/thumbnail.jp

Eudora Welty\u27s \u3cem\u3eCollected Stories\u3c/em\u3e: 100th Birthday Celebration

Pearl McHaney, moderato

More Conversations with Eudora Welty

Interviews with Eudora Welty, Edited by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw University Press of Mississippi (Paperback, $16.95, ISBN: 0878058656, 4/1996)https://egrove.olemiss.edu/mwp_books/1214/thumbnail.jp

Exhibition and Lecture; Light lunch

Kathryn McKee, moderator Southern Women Making Up Themselves, Peggy Whitman Prenshaw Lunch hosted by Julia Rholes, Dean of University Librarie

Survivors of \u3cem\u3eGeronimo Rex\u3c/em\u3e

William Dunlap, moderato

The University Press of Mississippi at 40 Years

Peggy Whitman Prenshaw, moderato

Special Issue: Elizabeth Spencer

IN MEMORIAM Elizabeth Spencer Michel Bandry Claude Maisonnat Danièle Pitavy-Souque