MOIRA CRONE

From Image Journal's Artist of the Month, August, 2006:
"In her stories about the tightly cloistered world of women in the small-town south of the fifties and sixties, Moira Crone illustrates what Flannery O'Connor called “the realism of distances”—the ability to see “near things with their extensions of meaning and thus [see] far things close up.” Crone has the born fiction writer's ability to lay out a tightly bounded world and create large moral dramas within it. Her frequent subject, the mythology around white southern womanhood, may have passed from history along with pastel shirtwaist dresses and magnolia blossoms, but the idea still matters because its extensions of meaning are still with us—and Crone doesn't spare us the ominous implications of the strained, dreadful beauty of those women and the culture that bound itself to the task of keeping them protected. Like the women she writes about, Crone's prose is diamond-polished—hard, cool, and elegant, with splendid flashes of comedy in the finely tuned dialogue. She gives us the point of view of both the darlings and the oddballs, and also explores the ambivalent position of Christian faith in the Jim Crow South within both black and white communities, sometimes a palliative, sometimes a source of moral courage unavailable from any other source."