The Annunciation

Ellen Gilchrist’s first novel, The Annunciation, was published by Little, Brown in 1983. It followed her first short-story collection, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, and preceded her short-story collection Victory over Japan, for which she won the National Book Award in 1984. A Mississippi native, Gilchrist lived in Fayetteville (Washington County) for most of her writing career and was, for many years, a faculty member at the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville.

In Part I, “Cargo,” protagonist Amanda McCamey moves to Esperanza Plantation (based on Gilchrist’s mother’s family’s Mississippi plantation, Hopedale) at age four and falls in love with her first cousin, Guy McCamey, becoming pregnant at age fourteen. After the child is born by cesarean section and given up for adoption, Amanda is sent by train to boarding school in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

Gilchrist attended Southern Seminary in Buena Vista, Virginia, but other aspects are not autobiographical. “I refuse to be cynical in any way about my work,” she wrote in Falling through Space, a collection of essays. “My work helps me live my life. It tells me who I am. Take The Annunciation, for example—my so-called novel. What was that obsession with adoption about? I’m not adopted and I’ve never given a child away.”

Part II, “Exile,” finds Amanda McCamey at forty-four years of age, married to a New Orleans lawyer named Malcolm Ashe, and reunited with her cousin Guy by the death of their grandmother. (Malcolm was the name of one of Gilchrist’s earliest American ancestors, and Gilchrist gave the name to the husband of at least one other protagonist. As a labor lawyer on the side of management, Malcolm Ashe bears a resemblance to Gilchrist’s last husband, Freddy Kullman.)

Malcolm Ashe is a generous and devoted husband to Amanda McCamey; Gilchrist describes their meeting at a museum gala: “He was just what Amanda had been looking for. She had become enchanted with Jews during the civil rights movement and thought every Jew was a crusading liberal.”

The chapters chronicling Amanda’s courtship and marriage to Malcolm Ashe are similar in subject matter to In the Land of Dreamy Dreams and offer a glimpse at the decadence of high society in New Orleans in the 1970s. However, Amanda sobers up, writes feature articles for local newspapers, studies translation at Tulane University, and is introduced to a potter named Katie Vee Dunbar who brings her to Fayetteville, Arkansas. (Katie Dunbar resembles the real-life Winifred “Fu” Ross, a member of Fayetteville’s Calabash Pottery Collective, as well as painter Ginny Crouch Stanford, wife of poet Frank Stanford.)

In Part III, “The Annunciation,” Amanda moves to Fayetteville. Gilchrist’s portrait of Fayetteville in the 1970s is rich in impressions and details that would interest any historian of that town: “Fayetteville, Arkansas. Beautiful little wooded mountain town. Lots of poets. No money. Clear air, clean rivers, wonderful skies. Nothing to do but go to school and make things and wait for the mail.”

The Fayetteville section disappointed some critics, including Jonathan Yardley, who wrote the following in his review for the Washington Post: “It’s here that, quite abruptly, The Annunciation loses its toughness and irony. Amid the potters and the professors and the philosopher-poets of the Ozarks, Amanda McCamey turns into mush. She falls madly in love with 25-year-old Will Lyons, though it is difficult to see why, and overnight she turns into a merchandizer of the most indigestible psychobabble.” The dialogue throughout the last two-thirds of the novel consists of “twaddle,” “hot-tub philosophizing,” and “sentimental nonsense of the sort that passed for profundity on the college campuses in the ’60s and ’70s,” according to Yardley.

Fans bought the book anyway. In her essay “The Wine Dark Sea,” Gilchrist, writes of the uncertainty of early menopause: “you think you’re pregnant all the time.” “I made a lot of money off that experience,” she adds, “by writing a book about a woman who has a baby when she is forty-four. It’s called The Annunciation and has sold about three hundred thousand copies in the last twelve years.”

For additional information:
Gilchrist, Ellen. The Annunciation. Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1983.

———. Falling through Space: The Journals of Ellen Gilchrist. Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1987.

———. Things Like the Truth: Out of My Later Years. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016.

Yardley, Jonathan. “A Talented Short Story Writer Takes on the Novel.” Washington Post, May 28, 1983.

Brooke Greenberg
Little Rock, Arkansas