The Optimist’s Daughter

After Judge McKelvey's death, the family inheritance is left to his second wife, the frivolous materialist Faye, more than 30 years younger than the deceased, and to the care of his recently widowed daughter Laurel, who only wants to preserve the memory of the family and its traditions. How do you cope after a loss when you are left alone, surrounded by hypocrites and poseurs? Why, instead of fighting for the inheritance, does Laurel resort to tidying up the garden? And does the black needletail that flew into the abandoned house really portend trouble? Eudora Welty dedicates the partly autobiographical novel The Optimist's Daughter to her mother, who, despite her husband's untimely death, devoted herself to caring for her three children, thereby instilling in the writer that family and memory are important to a person, so it is worth letting go of the bad and seeing the good everywhere. And to guard that good as the apple of the eye.