Short Fiction:
In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, 1981
Victory over Japan: A Book of Stories, 1984
Drunk with Love: A Book of Stories, 1986
Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle: A Book of Stories, 1989
The Age of Miracles: Stories, 1995
Rhoda: A Life in Stories, 1995
The Courts of Love: Stories, 1996 (pb. in England as Nora Jane and Company)
Flights of Angels: Stories, 1998
The Cabal, and Other Stories, 2000
Collected Stories, 2000
I, Rhoda Manning, Go Hunting with My Daddy, and Other Stories, 2002
Long Fiction:
The Annunciation, 1983
The Anna Papers, 1988
I Cannot Get You Close Enough: Three Novellas, 1990 (includes Winter, De Havilland Hand, and A Summer in Maine)
Net of Jewels, 1992
Starcarbon: A Meditation on Love, 1994
Anabasis: A Journey to the Interior, 1994
Poetry:
The Land Surveyor’s Daughter, 1979
Riding Out the Tropical Depression: Selected Poems, 1986
Nonfiction:
Falling Through Space: The Journals of Ellen Gilchrist, 1987
Teleplay:
The Season of Dreams, 1968
Ellen Louise Gilchrist (GIHL-krihst) is one of the most prolific and widely read contemporary southern writers. Her stories “Rich” and “Summer, an Elegy” (from In the Land of Dreamy Dreams) received a Pushcart Prize, and Victory over Japan won an American Book Award. The experiences of Gilchrist’s strong-willed heroines resemble her own rather turbulent life. Gilchrist and her older brother Dooley spent much of their childhood at their maternal grandparents’ plantation in Issaquena County, Mississippi. Later, not unlike Gilchrist’s central, recurring character Rhoda Manning, her father, an engineer and one-time professional baseball player, traveled across the country with his family in pursuit of assignments. Gilchrist grew up in several small southern and midwestern towns, the places of her stories. Her contributions for National Public Radio (1984-1985), collected in Falling Through Space, are a tribute to these early years and to her coming-of-age as a writer. In this work, Gilchrist divulges that her favorite character, Rhoda, and Rhoda’s brother, Dudley, who are featured in many stories and in the novel Net of Jewels, were closely modeled on her own experience.
Gilchrist’s schooling was characterized more by voracious reading than by regular school attendance. At the age of nineteen she eloped. Gilchrist married and divorced three more times; the third time she remarried her first husband, who was also the father of her three sons. After her first divorce, she went back to school. In 1967, while at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, she took creative writing classes from Eudora Welty.
Gilchrist did not embark on a professional writing career until the age of forty, partly because she regards the solitary act of writing as being incompatible with romantic happiness and family life. In her younger days she was too preoccupied with raising a family to submit to the lonely rigors of writing. While living in New Orleans, the setting of many stories, where she mingled with wealthy, tennis-playing people, Gilchrist wrote poetry. Later she attended courses of the writer James Whitehead at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.
Gilchrist’s first published collection of short stories, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, was an immediate success. Critics praised its wry humor and authentic depiction of childhood and adolescent sensibilities. Gilchrist describes the sexual awakening and the tragic theatrical events of girlhood against a backdrop of strained marriages and southern summers. Gilchrist’s predominantly female protagonists show a remarkable keenness and curiosity in sexual matters. They appear simultaneously terrible and endearing, fragile and omnipotent, drawn as they are with Gilchrist’s often equivocal tone.
In Victory over Japan and Flights of Angels Gilchrist introduces or revisits several characters whose stories she weaves into an elaborate tapestry of voices in her subsequent work. In a tradition that includes William Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, and J. D. Salinger, Gilchrist has created a body of work with its own set of familiar recurring protagonists, most notably the Manning, Weiss, and Hand clans (featured in Net of Jewels, I Cannot Get You Close Enough, and Starcarbon). Rhoda again figures prominently, as do Nora Jane Whittington and the aristocratic but troubled Crystal Manning, who is seen through the eyes of her loyal black maid, Traceleen. Gilchrist’s women are driven by impulse and a constant, sometimes desperate search for love; consequently they often succumb to alcohol, drugs, or sheer boredom.
Aside from Rhoda, a writer and journalist, who is the most fully rendered of Gilchrist’s heroines, several others, too, are eccentric alter egos of the author. Amanda McCamey (in The Annunciation), raised on a Mississippi plantation, marries for money, divorces, and embraces her new life as a translator in the artistic community of a university town. Anna Hand (in The Anna Papers), a headstrong novelist, commits suicide after being diagnosed with breast cancer and facing loneliness in the wake of two failed marriages, many affairs, and six miscarriages. Drunk with Love tellingly explores the colorful world of rambunctious Gilchrist heroines haunted by love and its often disastrous consequences. Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle, along with some well-rendered childhood stories, provides alternate endings to The Annunciation. The Age of Miracles is a continuation of Gilchrist’s passionate sagas involving a now middle-aged Rhoda, a teen-age Nora Jane, Crystal, and several new characters. Anabasis, set in ancient Greece and at first glance a departure in Gilchrist’s work, tells the story of a strong female, the orphaned slave Aurelia.
In her writing Gilchrist creates a mysterious rapport between people–not just lovers–who exhibit an enduring ability to connect across barriers of time, age, social constraints, or racial differences. In spite of smoldering tensions, erupting sometimes into full-fledged wars between spouses, siblings, or parents and adolescents, Gilchrist’s outlook radiates optimism. There are bonds that endure, that will not permit a revocation of all that is shared; this principle is best embodied in Rhoda’s tempestuous relationship with her domineering father. Although much of Gilchrist’s fiction teems with shocking events, the bulk of her work is life-affirming and embraces existence as “a wild burgeoning process.”