Clytie: An Orphaned Story

Eudora Welty had difficulty finding "Clytie" a home in a publication and it came to be known as her orphaned story. Publishers didn't want to include the story in her collection of short works, neither did magazine editors want to publish it individually. Rejection of the story was based on a common complaint among editors-- they thought there was too much left unexplained, particularly concerning Clytie's suicide and the identity of the obscured face that haunts her. Eventually it was accepted for publication in the Southern Review in 1941, and was afterwards revised and included in her collection of short stories, A Curtain of Green. 

Excerpt from a letter to Eudora Welty from her publishing agent Darmuid Russell:

"I like it but I don’t think it is as good as others of yours that I have seen. There seems to me to be some obscurity about it that makes it difficult to understand. The face of love that you refer to is obviously some dream or imagination that has haunted Clytie…. But I think that that dream or imagination is hardly made clear enough to the reader to [explain why] Clytie commit[s] suicide."

Welty's Response:

“The face Clytie was seeking would have been more definite, except that Clytie could not ever concentrate. Perhaps the events were not strong enough to justify her sticking her head down the rain barrel, but I felt sorry for her.”