There is a front porch at Andalusia that stretches across the front of the house. O’Connor’s room was just inside the front door to the left, at the bottom of the stairway. It is easy to imagine her, recently diagnosed and depressed, sitting in a black mood on one of the white porch chairs after having surrendered to a barrage of admonitions to enjoy the view. Flannery O’Connor’s collected letters, The Habit of Being, begin when she returned to Andalusia. Its 600 pages of correspondence (uncorrected grammar and imaginative spelling included) are essential to the understanding of her writing, not only because her theories of writing are espoused in there but because they provide such a complete picture of herself and her life on the farm. Something of the precocious, sheltered child lingers in her letters, also a warmth that is obscured in the darker, fiercer stuff of her fiction.
The farm, and a character fitting Regina’s description, stepped into several stories. The dairy barn played a role in “The Enduring Chill,” “The Displaced Person” and “Good Country Folk,” all of which featured a single woman running a farm. Andalusia’s appealing little white wooden water tower appeared in “A Circle in the Fire,” a story about a boy named Powell and his two juvenile delinquent companions who take advantage of a Mrs. Cope’s good Christian offer of some lunch.
