Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Delta Wedding
    Delta Wedding
    Delta Wedding
    Audiobook12 hours

    Delta Wedding

    Written by Eudora Welty

    Narrated by Sally Darling

    3.5/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    Set on the Mississippi Delta in 1923, this story captures the mind and manners of the Fairchilds, a large aristocratic family, self-contained and elusive as the wind. The vagaries of the Fairchilds are keenly observed, and sometimes harshly judged, by nine-year-old Laura McRaven, a Fairchild cousin who takes The Yellow Dog train to the Delta for Dabney Fairchild's wedding. An only child whose mother has just died, Laura is resentful of her boisterous, careless cousins, and desperate for their acceptance. As the hour moves closer and closer to wedding day, Laura arrives at a more subtle understanding of both the Fairchilds and herself. Born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi, Eudora Welty is one of the South's finest novelists. She won a Pulitzer in 1972 for The Optimist's Daughter. Delta Wedding is her best known work.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateMay 6, 2011
    ISBN9781456125066
    Author

    Eudora Welty

    EUDORA WELTY (1909–2001) was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and attended the Mississippi State College for Women, the University of Wisconsin, and Columbia University (where she studied advertising). In addition to short fiction, Welty wrote novels, novellas, essays, and reviews, and was the winner of both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

    More audiobooks from Eudora Welty

    Related to Delta Wedding

    Related audiobooks

    Literary Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    Related categories

    Reviews for Delta Wedding

    3.5/5

    153 ratings9 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Delta Wedding is the story of the Fairchild family at the time of daughter Dabney’s wedding. The Fairchilds are a wealthy early 20th-century Mississippi Delta family; Dabney is marrying their overseer, Troy. That Dabney is 17 and Troy in his 30s, and that she is marrying beneath her station, don’t seem to bother anyone – at least not enough to do something about it. In another author’s hands this might be the central conflict of this novel, but Eudora Welty has something else in mind. This is primarily a portrait of a family at a certain place and time, how each person relates to one another, and how class informs their world view.While Welty’s prose gripped me from the first page, as her characters tumbled off the page I found I had to concentrate more than usual just to keep up. Characters are given little introduction and it took quite a while for me to piece together the family relationships, and distinguish the servants from family members. Dabney is one of the least complex characters; her uncle George, on the other hand, is an enigma. He is different from the rest and held on a pedestal, for reasons that are never entirely clear. The plot – events in the days leading up to Dabney’s wedding – is secondary to the everyday interactions between people, and the composite picture this creates.Although I can’t quite say I enjoyed Delta Wedding, it left me with a respect and appreciation for Eudora Welty and a desire to read more of her work.
    • 3/5
      It's 1923, and nine-year-old Laura McRaven is taking the train down to visit her mother's family in the Delta for the wedding of one of her cousins. As preparations for the big day ramp up, family secrets circulate and emotions run high.Does anyone ever read Eudora Welty and immediately comprehend exactly what she's getting at? Because I find her immensely challenging. The writing is beautiful, but sometimes I have to read a sentence multiple times to untangle the syntax -- and there were a few times when I basically shrugged and moved on! Add to that the particularly Southern vocabulary (for instance, I had to look up "joggling boards"), and characters with names like Battle, Dabney, and Lady Clare (many of which repeat over generations, so they may be talking about an existing character or her deceased great-great-aunt), and the result is a slow-reading text, languid as a Mississippi summer.Personally, I would have liked this book better if it had remained in Laura's perspective the whole way through. Instead, the point of view shifted frequently, sometimes disconcertingly, from one character to another, and that character might get lost in reminiscences for several pages before picking back up in the middle of a scene. There's not a great deal of plot here ("a southern family prepares for a big wedding" about sums it up), so there's nothing to pull the story along.I did enjoy parts of this book -- the characterization was strong, and of course the setting shines. I probably won't keep or reread it, but I'm glad I made the effort.
    • 5/5
      Reading Delta Wedding is like attending a family wedding and meeting all your distant relatives for the first time. You have a sense of belonging and, at the same time, a sense of being an outsider. Everyone seems to know everyone so much better than you do and you're rushing to catch up on everyone's story and sort out who is who. This is a relatively short book, but perhaps because she is primarily a short-story writer, Eudora Welty has packed this book so densely with character and detail, you will feel as though you have read a family saga of many hundred pages. The delta is recreated in such detail that you can feel the humid, misty breezes and hear the crickets chirping. The young girls through whose perspective you watch the proceedings are enchanting.

      Struggling to keep track of the characters forced me to go back and re-read parts of the book at times, which was, in fact, helpful in discovering important overlooked details. This is a book you can re-read many times always discovering something or someone new.
    • 3/5
      I felt like I needed to read something of Welty's; so much has been made of her writing. This book paints a vivid picture and has very interesting characters. But I really felt like the story itself dragged.
    • 4/5
      A tender look at a young girl thrust among her brood of colorful, yet loving, relations on the eve of a wedding. The relationships between all are explored including that of George who is married both to his family and to Robbie, a young woman who wants George to put her first. This family's love is almost too much, but somehow falls short of becoming a stranglehold -- but just barely.
    • 5/5
      I found this delightful. I listened to this a few years ago when I worked at a public library. It was my first Welty story...and my last. I have not been able to get into any others since then. I was enchanted with the people on the old homeplace/plantation. Their references to their former lives...The way they came together for holidays and the general decadent, overgrown feeling. I confuse it now with The Christmas Gift by Ferrol Sams.
    • 3/5
      St. Barts 2013 #3 - An ok book at best for me....certainly interesting at times, but overwhelmingly full of characters that were challenging to keep track of - are they siblings or cousins, which generation, and alive or dead? But I suppose this helped us feel a little like the nine-year-old Laura showing up for a big family wedding at Shellmound Plantation. Certainly an interesting portrait of the life on a 1920's Mississippi cotton plantation, specifically a huge self absorbed wealthy family surrounded by meddling sisters, cousins and aunts. I appreciated the efforts of a few of them to possibly question their values as a clan, but it was slow and tedious more than enlightening. (Oh, there were several appropriate references to some cool old cars of the time which always sparks a little something in me!) My guess is that this portrayal may be frighteningly spot-on, giving this book a far greater stature than I can give it personally. My complete lack of familiarity with the subject matter in a book usually does not preclude me from getting caught up nonetheless, but this never got a bite in me at all.
    • 4/5
      not too bad, a bit long-winded. i like it for the southerness, i think girls will like it better for everything else.
    • 3/5
      Though the writing was lush, and the characterizations apt, the novel did show the flaws that you might have expected from a first-time author.The tone of the first chapter, from the point of view of a young child, was excellent. But she was not able to construct a story line that could be told from Laura's point of view, and had to flit from character to character to continue the narrative. There was no character development, no revelations, no resolution, no explanation of any of the odd (though interesting) characters that drifted through the delta.