I like short stories and I like female writers who work in that form: Lydia Davies, Loorie Moore, Alice Munroe, Tove Jansson etc. so it all felt very serendipitous. And the book was in that fantastic Penguin Classics series, with its black and white covers and great overall look that make you pass for a hipster at a local swish cafe on Saturday mornings.
Porter was born in 1890, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1965, and wrote one novel (Ship of Fools - apparently it is famous but I'd never heard of it until researching this post) and 27 stories. From the first story in this book, Maria Concepcion, I was taken. Characters were defined sharply , the sense of place and time was evoked powerfully, and the ending opened the story up completely. As I was reading it,it was like the story grew and grew , encompassing so much more.
In The Jilting of Granny Weatherall, Porter writes about the slow death of Ms Weatherall from the point of view of the dying woman (The Death of Ivan Ilyich will come to mind, obviously). We go in and out of Granny's consciousness and reality. At one point she listens to her doctor, and the next she is off on the trail of an old memory. One returns often - that of the jilting of the title. I don't think I'll give too much away by writing down the almost perfect ending:
