GILCHRIST, Ellen

Born 20 February 1935, Vicksburg, Mississippi

Daughter of William G. and Aurora Aford Gilchrist; married Marshall Walker (twice); Freddie Kullam; children: Marshall, Garth, Pierce

Although she calls herself a poet and philosopher, Ellen Gilchrist is best known for her short stories and novels. The daughter of an engineer, Gilchrist spent some of her childhood in Indiana during World War II, but has lived most of her life in the South of her ancestors and of her own creation. Her childhood is a series of memories of the Hopedale Plantation where her mother's family lived and where Gilchrist was born. It is, she says, " THE RICHEST LAND IN THE WORLD and we are happy there." Gilchrist attended Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi (B.A., 1967) and has worked as a journalist and as a weekly commentator on National Public Radio's Morning Edition.

Mother of three sons and several times a grandmother, Gilchrist asserts that children are much more important than writing and that she would burn all her books to save one finger joint of one of her children or grandchildren. It is not surprising, then, to find many of her stories peopled by adolescents who are struggling to find themselves, parents who live only to help their children survive, and family retainers who create an optimistic perspective on the possibility of family endurance. Gilchrist herself says she is a happy person and an optimist.

Gilchrist's first book of short stories, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams (1981), was published by the University of Arkansas Press because Gilchrist was afraid to let her teacher give it to a New York agent; the underground success of the book led Little, Brown to reissue it in 1985. The stories are set among the vacuous rich of New Orelans or the dying aristocracy of the Mississippi Delta where Gilchrist spent much of her childhood. Stories about surviving, and sometimes not surviving, they all have a quality of vision about them. They are rampant with children whose lives are sprinkled with moments from Gilchrist's own childhood; even those who die live a rich moment in her fiction.

Two other short story collections, Victory Over Japan (1984), which won the American Book award for fiction, and Drunk with Love (1986), brought Gilchrist further recognition as a writer in control of her Southern material. In these volumes, some characters from In the Land of Dreamy Dreams return and Gilchrist writes about their lives with perception and humor. Perhaps the most important character in Victory Over Japan is Traceleen, a black maid who, despite the fact Gilchrist often waxes too poetic about the dedication of servants, is wise beyond Gilchrist's own wisdom.

The Annunciation (1983), Gilchrist's ambitious but flawed first novel, features Amanda McCamey, who is too stereotypically New Orleans rich, too egotistical. Finally, when she retreats to Arkansas to live simply and be a writer, she is simply unbelievable. The eternally dedicated Lavertis, another version of Traceleen and Amanda's ever faithful maid, strains the book's credulity, but the effort is grand, and Gilchrist tries to deal with large issues of loss (Amanda was forced, as a teenager, to give up a child for adoption) and creativity. Her pictures of New Orleans capture the heart of the city's richness and vacuity.

With the publication of The Anna Papers (1988), Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle (1989), and I Cannot Get You Close Enough (1990), Gilchrist began to transcribe what her characters told her to and thus to lose the control she had over her best fiction. There are some excellent adolescent characters in the Hand family who people much of The Anna Papers and I Cannot Get You Close Enough, but the artist character, Anna Hand, who seems to be a side of Gilchrist herself, is too self-advertising and often too self-absorbed to see how her actions affect her family.

In Net of Jewels (1992) Gilchrist once again incorporates pressing issues into her fiction. She asks, through the character of Rhoda Manning, how a woman can save herself from drowning in the limited and limiting culture of the South. A cousin of Anna Hand, Rhoda struggles through a series of attempts to find herself in marriage, affairs, diet pills, booze, and political movements—none of which can help her dispel her desperate sense she is not really alive.

Gilchrist has a fine talent for capturing the voices of rich, dissatisfied Southern ladies; she has a real empathy for her adolescents; and she has a Southerner's eye for the landscape outside and inside her characters. The author of one book of poetry, The Land Surveyor's Daughter (1979), she told an interviewer she would one day stop writing fiction and return to poetry, a way, perhaps, for her to regain the control she demonstrated in her earlier work.

In Starcarbon: A Meditation on Love (1994), Gilchrist resurrects the Hand family, which first appeared in I Cannot Get You Close Enough. Starcarbon focuses on Daniel Hand's second daughter, Olivia, a half-Cherokee who has completed her first year in college. As usual, Gilchrist's theme is love. She follows a number of relationships through this novel, including Olivia's relationship with Bobby Tree, the Navajo boyfriend she left behind in Oklahoma to live in wealth with her father. Olivia returns to her Native American family to study their ways and rekindle her relationship with Bobby.

Gilchrist tackles a period piece in Anabasis: A Journey to the Interior (1995). The lyrical novel is set in ancient Greece when Pericles ruled Athens. Auria, a young slave girl, is placed in the hands of an herbalist, Philokrates, from whom she escapes and joins a band of runaway slaves who are planning a rebellion. This is the story of an assertive, independent heroine as found in many of Gilchrist's novels. The author began developing the story as a child when her mother read Greek myths to her.

In Rhoda: A Life in Stories (1995), Rhoda Manning, the fictional author who appears in all of Gilchrist's previous short story collections, rates her own anthology. This volume presents all 21 Rhoda stories, an excerpt from Net of Jewels (the novel in which she appeared), and two new short story offerings arranged chronologically by Rhoda's age, covering her life from age 8 to age 60. In The Age of Miracles (1996), Gilchrist returns to short stories after several novels. In keeping with her previous collections, these tales feature characters with strong personalities and conflicting emotions.

The Courts of Love (1996) includes a novella and nine short stories. The novella and a few of the stories focus on the recurring character Nora Jane, first encountered in Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle. The novella, Nora Jane and Company, is full of action, including a brush with a terrorist, an emergency in the California wilderness, and the spirit of Leonardo da Vinci. Gilchrist continues to produce wonderful prose and passionate characters.

Sarah Conley (1997) is a novel with a new character, Sarah Conley, a 52-year-old journalist, successful and independent in true Gilchrist form. She is called back to Nashville, where her best friend, Eugenie Moore, is dying, and encounters Eugenie's husband, Jack McAllen, whom she has always loved and who is her ex-husband's brother. When Sarah flies off to Paris to write and Jack pursues her, she is faced with a choice between the career in which she has submerged herself for years and her love for Jack.

Flights of Angels (1999) is another collection of 18 Gilchrist short stories presenting several new characters and some popular characters from her past works, including Rhoda and her family and Crystal and her maid, Traceleen. Throughout these tales, a theme emerges of desire on the part of the characters to make their lives meaningful beyond their immediate environments. The protagonists are largely women raised as Southern belles who break from their controlling male relatives to move on with their lives in independence.

Other Works:

Falling through Space: The Journals of Ellen Gilchrist (1987).

Bibliography:

Reference works:

CA (1985, 1986). CLC (1985, 1988). CLCY (1984). DLB (1984). FC (1990). MTCW (1991). Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States (1995).

Other references:

BL (15 Jan. 1994, 1 Sept. 1994, 1 Apr. 1995, 15 Oct. 1996, Aug. 1997, Aug. 1998). LJ (1 Sept. 1997, 15 Sept. 1996). New Orleans Review (Spring 1988). New Orleans Times Picayune (14 Oct. 1990). PW (31 Jan. 1994, 8 Aug. 1994, 18 Sept. 1995, 26 Aug. 1996, 7 July 1997, 14 Sept. 1998). Southern Quarterly (Fall 1983).

—MARY A. MCCAY,

UPDATED BY REBECCA C. CONDIT