Female Characters of Novelist Clyde Edgerton

Edgerton's ability to write women characters has been praised by critics and readers, and Edgerton himself has noted his view of why this is so:

I've been very satisfied to know that women who read the book believe that the voice sounds authentic. In our inner lives there are perhaps fewer differences between men and women than we sometimes think. . . growing up with women, listening to stories more or less subconsciously, contributed by my writing from a woman's point of view. I do not find it difficult (Robbins 61).

Edgerton has also cited as his literary inspiration Eudora Welty, another woman whose voice he respected:

The tone of her voice and the gentle, thorough humor in the story ["Why I Love at the P.O." by Eudora Welty] combined in a way that motivated me. People in Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor were people I know (Miller 35).

Edgerton's first novel, Raney, featured the sort of woman he would cope with in many of his works, and he had first created the character in two

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rsonal life because her children have not married--she wants grandchildren and has none. Cooking is an important metaphor for the life of this character, and she continues to cook three meals a day in spite of her age. She shares a musical interest with Raney as she plays hymns on the piano, combining her devotion to God with her love of music. However, it is through cooking that she expresses herself most directly: In Walking Across Egypt, the core of Mattie Rigsbee's world is cooking for people, anyone and everyone that she can entice to share her table. Preparing a mean means more to Mattie than simply completing a household chore; cooking has become a means of personal expression (Dvorak 91). Mattie addresses every situation and every problem with cooking. When Alora visits and bothers her, Mattie tells herself she wishes Alora would go home, but she tells Alora to "stay and eat a bit" (Edgerton, Walking Across Egypt 30). Dvorak points out that this stems from limitations placed on the elderly woman by her life in a traditional southern society and that the woman's life has been consumed with meeting the needs of other people (Dvorak 92). Mattie shows this need to serve others in the novel with her care for the dogcat
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Approximate Word count = 1845
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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