It’s jarring, maybe, to think of Flannery O’Connor as an old lady. Then again, to our eyes, in photographs from the last years of her life, maybe she looks already old. In our imagination, she stands forever on the front porch steps of Andalusia, the Georgia farm where she lived with her mother, in her cat-eyed glasses, staid housedresses, puffs of hair either side of her face. I was born in November 1964, three months and three days after O’Connor’s death. My bookish grandmother, married in 1925, the year O’Connor was born, looked in her 60s an awful lot like those photos. Women in their 30s don’t look like that anymore.
And then there’s the fact of her illness. On the steps of Andalusia, she stands on crutches. The lupus that eventually killed her, and the various treatments for it, aged her body, if not her spirit. Sally Fitzgerald, who edited the 1979 collection of O’Connor’s letters under the title The Habit of Being, remembered the rumblings of something wrong in the period before her friend’s diagnosis with the autoimmune disease. “When, in December 1950, I had put Flannery on the train for Georgia she was smiling perhaps a little wanly but wearing her beret at a jaunty angle. … By the time she arrived she looked, her uncle later said, ‘like a shriveled little old woman.’” The lupus savaged her organs while the steroids swelled her face and disintegrated her hips. In her 20s and 30s, she could manage two hours of writing every morning after the daily 8 a.m. Mass at the Church of the Sacred Heart in Milledgeville.
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