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The Cracked Looking GlassThis piece of short fiction was originally published in 1939 and originally appears in the collection Pale Horse, Pale Rider, which I have not read. I’ve been interested in Katherine Anne Porter for a while, though, and this was a nice, bite sized entry into her work. She published one novel, Ship of Fools, which was so successful that it lifted her out of poverty and provided resources for the remainder of her life. It was also adapted for a film starring Vivian Leigh. In 1966, she won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter.
This was an excellent short story, with great characterization. The main character, Rosaleen, is an Irish immigrant from County Sligo (this is a point of pride with Rosaleen, and may make sense to someone more familiar to Ireland) living in Connecticut with her ailing, much older, husband, Dennis. Rosaleen is a spark of a woman, with red hair and an attitude to match. She is struggling with a lack of fulfillment in her marriage.
Probably my favorite work from either of the Penguin box sets so far.
Nice to see a post on Porter; is it my imagination that she isn’t particularly read much these days? Many years ago I read Ship of Fools and enjoyed it a great deal, although I’m not sure how I’d react to it now (on the other hand, I’ve been taking a trip down memory lane recently, reading Somerset Maugham’s Razor’s Edge and Moon & Sixpence, both of which IMO have held up pretty well). I’ll have to give some of Porter’s shorter fiction a try.
I feel like you’re right about Porter. I think I might be more interested in her short stories than Ship of Fools.
Although I think I read this collection years ago, it is obviously too long ago for me to remember this story! Maybe I should reread it.