User:Rebbing/Notes/Flannery O'Connor
Sourcing issues[edit]
When was Miss O'Connor told of her lupus diagnosis?[edit]
From one biography:
Surprisingly enough, Regina O'Connor kept the diagnosis a secret from O'Connor until Christmas 1952. While O'Connor was visiting the Fitzgeralds for the holidays, Sally [Fitzgerald] broke the news of the diagnosis to O'Connor, knowing she was going against Regina's wishes. Never one to be less than fully attentive to the world around her, O'Connor revealed that she had suspected lupus all along and thanked Fitzgerald for her honesty.[1]
What an eye-catching quote! I did not at first question the story, as it appeared truthful to me, and the book is published by a legitimate, if scholastic, publishing house. But, while looking for something else in The Habit of Being, a published collection of Miss O'Connor's letters, I came across a letter from the summer of 1952: "Regina [Miss O'Connor's mother] says Dr. Merrill diagnosed it as lupus before he even saw me. Over the phone.[2]" If Miss O'Connor wrote Mrs. Fitzgerald in the summer of 1952 that her mother had told her about her diagnosis, Mrs. Fitzgerald could not have revealed that "secret" to her in Christmas of 1952.[3]
When was Miss O'Connor diagnosed with lupus?[edit]
I found this proclaimation in a respectable-sounding paper:
With grim and certain diagnosis in July of 1952, Atlanta specialist Arthur J. Merrill informed Flannery O'Connor that lupus, and not rheumatoid arthritis, as concluded earlier by a physician in O'Connor's hometown, engendered her hip pain and other symptoms of internal distress.[4]
The paper cites to (styled as Bluebook): The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor 38–39 (S. Fitzgerald ed., Vintage-Random House (New York) 1980). I don't have access to that edition, but I thoroughly scoured my edition, and the closest thing I could find was the letter quoted in § When was Miss O'Connor told of her lupus diagnosis? above. I can't rule out the narrative from Metaphor, but, as it appears to be questionably sourced, I can't in good faith use it.
Notes[edit]
- ^ Melissa Simpson, Flannery O'Connor: A Biography 19–20 (Greenwood Press 2005).
- ^ Letter from Flannery O'Connor to Sally Fitzgerald (undated, summer 1952), in The Habit of Being 40 (Sally Fitzgerald ed., Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1979).
- ^ See also Editor's comment, in The Habit of Being, supra note 2, at 37 ("[I]n the summer of 1952, she learned the true nature of her illness . . . ."); Letter from Flannery O'Connor to Robert Fitzgerald (July 1952), in The Habit of Being, supra note 2, at 39 ("I now know that it is lupus and am very glad to so know . . . ."). But see Rich Kelley, Brad Gooch: Flannery O'Connor's Apocalyptic Tall Tales "Give Us the News That We Need to Hear" News and Views (Libr. of Am., New York, N.Y.), Sept. 22, 2009, archived at Archive.org (May 16, 2016) ("She began writing 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find,' with The Misfit gunning down an entire family in the woods, after returning from Connecticut, where Sally Fitzgerald clued her in that the nature of her own illness was lupus, a diagnosis that her mother had kept from her. Fitzgerald remembered thinking, when mailed a draft in the spring of 1953, 'It was no coincidence that Flannery wrote that story within months of, metaphorically, having a gun aimed at her.'" (internal quotation marks omitted)).
- ^ Carl S. Homer, Misfit as Metaphor: The Question and the Contradiction of Lupus in Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find", Disability Studies Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 4, Fall 2005, <http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/607/784> [hereinafter Metaphor].