From the 1970 Random House edition of Losing Battles by Eudora Welty:Losing Battles by Eudora Welty is a story of rural Mississippi in the 1930s that will immediately be recognized as a classic in the seriocomic tradition in American fiction.
On the hot, dry first Sunday of August, three generations of Granny Vaughn’s descendants gather at her home in celebration of her ninetieth birthday. The action covers two days, but since many members of this enormous family are great tale-tellers, the reader experiences much of the past as well. Dialogue and action are often marvelously funny, wildly so at times, but underneath are serious, even somber tones.Read More→
At one of the library sales I frequent in my quest for classics by women authors, I came upon Sara Crewe: or, What Happened at Miss Minchin’s by Frances Hodgson Burnett. This confused me; wasn’t this the story always known as A Little Princess?
It turns out that Sara Crewe is an earlier version of what became the classic. It was serialized in St. Nicholas magazine in 1887, then collected into a novella, published in 1888 by Charles Scribner’s Sons.
In 1905, the expanded story was published for all time as we best know it, titled A Little Princess. And since then, the story has been performed on stage, filmed in several versions, and is consistently named one of the top novels for children of all time.
