The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories

The Bride of Innisfallen and Other Stories is a collection of short fiction by Eudora Welty published in 1955 by Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich. Welty's fourth volume of short stories, it was her last collection before the collected and uncollected short fiction appeared in The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (1980).

Stories

• “No Place for You, My Love” (The New Yorker, September 20, 1952)
• “The Burning” (Harper's Bazaar, March 1951)
• “The Bride of the Innisfallen” (The New Yorker, December 1, 1951)
• “Ladies in Spring” (The Sewanee Review, Winter 1954; a.k.a. “Spring”)
• “Circe” (Ascent, (Fall 1949); a.k.a. “Put Me in the Sky!”)
• “Kin” (The New Yorker, November 15, 1952)
• “Going to Naples” (Harper's Bazaar, July 1954)

Reception

The critical response to the collection varied widely. Critic Orville Prescott at the New York Times disparaged the collection:

The same influence exerted by Bowen detected and disparaged by Prescott met with approval by critic Francis Gaither at the New York Review of Books: “Miss Welty’s talents, invested in these foreign ventures, have suffered no adverse sea-change.”

Saturday Review Syndicate reviewer John Barkman provided fulsome approval for the collection:

Theme

Ruth D. Weston in The Southern Literary Journal calls these stories “the most enigmatic” among Welty’s collections.

According to biographer Suzanne Marrs, Welty “disoritented” critics when she set over half the stories in the collection outside of Welty’s native Mississippi. The loss of a "sense of place" that characterized all of her earlier stories “may be the key reason they so bewildered Welty's readers” In these tales, Welty no longer asserts that locale “is essential to identity.” Rather, “she deals with the way individuals can live and create meaning for themselves without being rooted in place and time. In particular, she focuses upon the nature of women's identities as they exist apart from any defining place. As such, The Bride of the Innisfallen reveals the author’s “increased sense of self-confidence as a writer” and “a determining factor in the new patterns her stories would follow.”

Footnotes

Sources

• Johnston, Carol Ann. 1997. Eudora Welty: A Study of the Short Fiction. Twayne Publishers, New York. Gordon Weaver, general editor.
• Marrs, Suzanne. 1997. "Place and the Displaced in Eudora Welty's "The Bride of the Innisfallen. The Mississippi Quarterly, Fall 1997, Vol. 50, No. 4, Special Issue: Eudora Welty (Fall 1997), pp. 647-668. The Johns Hopkins University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26476902 Accessed October 3, 2025.
• Marrs, Suzanne. 2005. Eudora Welty: A Biography. Harvest Books, Orlando, Florida. (paperback)
• Welty, Eudora. 2001. The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. Barnes & Noble Modern Classics edition.
• Welty, Eudora. 1955. The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York.
• Weston, Ruth D. 2000. Reticent Beauty and Promiscuous Joy: Textual Framing in Eudora Welty's "The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories" The Southern Literary Journal , Spring, 2000, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Spring, 2000), pp. 42–58 Published by: University of North Carolina Press https://www.jstor.org/stable/20078266