Drastic Unalikes: Flannery O’Connor and Her Mother

Carol Loeb Shloss. Flannery and Regina: The Andalusia Chronicles. University of Georgia Press, 2026. $32.95. 200 pp.

Flannery O’Connor enthusiasts know that she spent the final thirteen years of her life (1951-64) living with her mother, Regina Cline O’Connor, on the family farm called Andalusia outside Milledgeville, Georgia, where Flannery had grown up and attended college. Against her wishes, she had been forced to return home because of her eventually fatal disease, disseminated lupus erythematosus. Though Flannery knew she would never inhabit any other fictional region than the South, she wanted to retain a critical distance from it. She had thrived while living with her dear friends Sally and Robert Fitzgerald in Connecticut. She feared that a return home would mean the death of her creative life. The pressuring thumb of her domineering mother was likely to make her chafe, distorting if not suppressing her literary imagination. No wonder that so many of her stories are focused on frustrated writers living at home with their domineering mothers—but with the sons and daughters found at much greater fault than the mothers. Flannery later admitted that, to her surprise, she did her best writing during these dozen years at Andalusia.

Carol Loeb Shloss recounts the story of their fruitful if often tense relation from a new angle of vision—the material conditions, especially the economic circumstances, that both constricted and enabled their life together. Relying on careful research into legal documents and financial records, she reveals Regina O’Connor to have been a shrewd if also selfish manager of land and money. They were her alpha and omega. Through a series of court maneuvers in 1957, she was able to claim sole ownership (excluding her own cousins) of the 500-acre Andalusia farm as well as the adjoining 1000 acres of undisturbed woodlands and open fields that her brother Bernard Cline had willed as a perpetual wildlife preserve.

As an entrepreneurial operator of the Andalusia dairy farm, Regina turned it into a profitable business. She oversaw everything—from the breeding of heifers to the birthing of calves; from the harvesting of feed corn to the baling of hay; from the digging of ponds to making sure that the livestock didn’t drown in them; from overseeing the work of seven laborers while keeping them more or less sober. Above all else, she managed the milk cows—the farm’s real source of income. 

More astonishing still is the revelation that penurious Regina treated Flannery as just another renter, docking her $30 per month at first and later $60, as the daughter’s royalties modestly increased. When she made Flannery a dress, she charged her $9.94. She also required Flannery to pay her doctors’ bills as well as to purchase her medicines, including the expensive cortisone shots that helped relieve the pain from her lupus. There is no evidence that Flannery ever protested these arrangements. Shloss shows, instead, that property—its ownership and management—looms large in Flannery’s fiction, especially in such stories as “A Circle in the Fire,” “Greenleaf,” and “A View of the Woods.” Far from being an innocent bystander, the daughter was a full-fledged participant in her mother’s shenanigans, even when putting them to good literary use. The chief value of Shloss’s book is that we will now need to heed these hard economic facts when interpreting Flannery O’Connor’s life and work.

Shloss conveys the previously unpublished news that Regina and Ed O’Connor did not have a happy or even a satisfactory marriage. In 1979, Sally Fitzgerald discovered and reported—in her sprawling 1000-page uncompleted biography—that “Ed couldn’t stand Regina… Ed made no secret of his misery. After a final effort—in the form of a trip to Connecticut—which failed because Regina continued to berate and scold him on every imaginable occasion, he gave up, saying to [his friend Rose Hognes] ‘I’m tearing out that page and throwing it away. Regina can just go to hell.’ Regina went home on the train.” Ed O’Connor died in 1941, when Flannery was 15. Yet, even in revealing the dire condition of their marriage, Shloss fails to draw the obvious conclusion. Flannery absorbed the conflict in her parents’ marriage and took her father’s side. She rode with him across Georgia as he gave American Legion speeches, admiring his rhetoric but never mentioning Regina in her accounts of these trips.

Flannery and Regina had radically opposing views on the race question as well. The daughter was a gradualist who feared that instant integration would be a disaster, bringing more harm than hope. She believed that a new set of racial manners would need to be developed before Black and white people could begin to live in amity rather than antagonism. Regina, by contrast, was a bitter oppositionist. Tom Gossett, my former Wake Forest colleague and ardent liberal—author of the groundbreaking 1963 book Race: The History of an Idea in America—exchanged notes with Flannery before he and his wife Louise drove up from Macon for a visit. Flannery warned them to steer clear of the race question. “That’s a train which, once it leaves the station, has no stopping places.”

Though Shloss cannot be faulted for not knowing such things, Regina and Flannery is a deeply flawed book. For example, it is littered with typos. “Prophesy” when “prophecy” was the requisite word. “Forthcoming” mistakenly understood to mean “forthright.” Julian the antagonist in “Everything That Rises Must Converge” is repeatedly misspelled “Julien,” ruining his clear association with Julian the Apostate. Shloss’s interpretations of individual stories also overlook their full Christian resonances. For example, she reads the ending of “Revelation” as Ruby’s encounter with “a new world where clothing cannot determine status,” and thus “a vision of the sanctity of life, a trespass on the customs of the country.” Apparently, Shloss knows nothing of Purgatory, with its central claim that Ruby and Claude’s small-bore virtues of decency and good order, no less than Mary Grace’s gross textbook-slinging righteousness, must be purged, consumed, redeemed in the fire of divine mercy. 

She also misses Father Finn’s hilarious catechizing of the esthete Asbury Fox in “The Enduring Chill,” saying only that they “talked past each other.” Nor does she catch the shrewdness of the black dairy workers who refuse to join Asbury in drinking the abundantly fresh but unpasteurized milk from the dairy. The result is that Asbury comes down with undulant fever, a lifelong but not fatal illness wherein chills and sweats alternate. Surely the worst of Shloss’s misprisions comes in her interpretation of “Parker’s Back,” O’Connor’s final polished story, a nearly perfect work. Whereas Parker is definitively drawn to the Christ Pantocrator—“the haloed head of a flat stern Byzantine Christ with all-demanding eyes” that Parker chooses to have incised onto his back—Shloss finds finds only indeterminacy. “Parker’s ‘story,’” she concludes, “may not have moved anyone else, the audience may remain unmoved, but he is radically and beautifully changed.” There is nothing beautiful about the broom-thrashing that the pregnant but life-denying Sarah Ruth visits upon Parker, raising welts on the Pantocrator’s face, much as Christ was scourged on the Via Dolorosa. Though Parker leans against a tree—his body figured as a crucifix—weeping over his failure to convert his wife, his new birth in Christ has not been canceled but only begun. The Byzantine Christ will keep summoning him down the road to suffering. Given the fierceness of Parker’s character, he will no doubt hear and heed.

It comes as no surprise that Shloss refers to Flannery’s “severe Catholicism,” clearly wishing it were something milder, less coarse. Though they were both Catholics, Regina was conventional while Flannery was radical. “The Eucharist is the center of existence for me,” she confessed; “all of the rest of life is expendable.” Even so, she and her mother formed a symbiotic team wherein both prospered, even though greater unalikes can hardly be imagined. Avoiding these distinctions, Shloss resorts to such vague anodyne phrases as “spiritual values countermand the material world.” Most egregiously, she refers to the O’Connors’ Catholicism as their “value system.” This phrase comes straight from the Sociology textbooks that Flannery studied in her undergraduate Social Science major. “Thank God, it didn’t take,” she later confessed, as if it were a bad inoculation. Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), the French founder of modern Sociology, argued that “Persons more committed to religion attribute relatively high importance to values expressing motivation to avoid uncertainty and change and relatively low importance to values expressing motivations to follow one's hedonistic desires, or to be independent in thought and action.”

For Flannery O’Connor, by contrast, risk and doubt and uncertainty, but especially change—conversion!—lie at the heart of Christian faith. The avoidance of occasions for sin is one of its chief imperatives, as is the confession that Christians live in radical communal and ecclesial dependence, not in independent thought and action. Shloss doesn’t deal with Flannery’s approach to death, perhaps because dying is not illuminated by economic and sociological analysis. Despite her wretched state at the end, Flannery did not want to die. “I’m sick of being sick… Pray that the lupus don’t finish me off too quick” were among her final pleas. Yet she made her most revealing confession to Robert Lowell in 1953, eleven years before her death. Expressing gratitude for the cortisone shots that had put her lupus under temporary control, Flannery added, “I have enough energy to write with and as that is all I have any business doing anyhow, I can with one eye squinted take it all [i.e., her disease and its dire results] as a blessing. What you have to measure out, you come to observe closer, or so I tell myself.” 

The double qualifiers are noteworthy. Not for a moment does Flannery roll her eyes to the skies and thank God for giving her lupus. Only with the squinted eye of honest doubt can she affirm the likelihood of early death. Six years later, in a letter to her close friend Elizabeth Hester, Flannery made a similar point: “It is much harder to believe than not to believe.” Not to doubt God is not to believe in God. Did not Jesus himself shout the protest of Psalm 22 from the Cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” If Carol Loeb Shloss had attended to such matters, she could have overcome the chief flaw of her book—its indifference to theological things.