Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens: The Fiction of Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'ConnorIn Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens, Louise Westling explores how the complex, difficult roles of women in southern culture shaped the literary worlds of Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor. Tracing the cultural heritage of the South, Westling shows how southern women reacted to the violent, false world created by their men a world in which women came to be shrouded as icons of purity in atonement for the sins of men. Exposing the