ENGL 4310

In class we have discussed a few times about how it feels to have someone you look up to read your story and express a liking in it. When O’Connor speaks to those college students, telling them how horrible they are is something we have talked about several times. I don’t remember if it was in class or in a blog, that it was mentioned that she hated telling anyone that they had promise because they would then jump all over her and never leave her alone (maybe it wasn’t even O’Connor who said this, I don’t remember). But we all decided that it is very nice to have someone that you admire tell you that your work is good. I thought that it was neat in one of O’Connor’s letters, she has found out that Lillian Hellman has read and liked her stories and was so pleased by it.

“I was terribly pleased to know that Lillian Hellman likes my stories. I had never thought of her even remotely as a person who would read them. It is always a revelation to find out the people who like and dislike them. It is another way of reading the stories” (1149).

I’m not sure what to make of that last sentence, “It is another way of reading the stories.” I think (please correct me if I’m wrong) that it is in the sense of seeing her stories in another “lens.” From a quick Google search Lillian Hellman was a very liberal playwright, which is different genre than what O’Connor wrote. So I’m sure that Hellman, not being a typical audience for O’Connor, brought a new lens to the stories that she had probably never thought of them in. O’Connor must have thought that her stories only applied to a certain group of people, and others wouldn’t relate. But with a “non-typical” reader expressing liking in her stories, I would think that O’Connor realized that her stories can’t be read and interpreted in one way.