THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT  
              Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Sunday, December 25, 1994              TAG: 9412210204
SECTION: COMMENTARY               PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 
TYPE: Book Review 
SOURCE: BY JEFFREY H. RICHARDS 
                                             LENGTH: Medium:   59 lines

THE LITERARY PERCYS

THE LITERARY PERCYS

Family, History, Gender and the Southern Imagination

BERTRAM WYATT-BROWN

University of Georgia Press. 110 pp. $19.95.

DELIVERED AT Mercer University as the Lamar Memorial Lectures, the chapters of this slim volume are essentially materials that could not fit in the author's much larger book, The House of Percy. They do, however, have their own integrity.

Bertram Wyatt-Brown looks back in The Literary Percys to the earliest writers in the family that would produce Walker Percy and discovers that they were all women. In addition, he describes in those early 19th-century descendants of Charles Percy patterns of ``melancholy'' that seem to fit directly into the literary consciousness of the best-known Percy, Walker. Thus where many literary biographies look to Walker's guardian and cousin, William Alexander Percy, as his literary progenitor, Wyatt-Brown brings back names long gone from the literary scene to show a deeper history than poor Will.

As an act of literary resurrection, the book has considerable value. Wyatt-Brown looks first at the Ware sisters, Catherine Ann and Eleanor Percy, whose co-authored books of poetry from the 1840s reflected the sentimental style of the period. After Eleanor Ware Lee's death in 1849, and a period of silence, Catherine Ware Warfield picked up pen again, but this time as a novelist, producing the Bronte-like The Household of Bouverie (1860). As Wyatt-Brown reconstructs it, the book is a better-than-middling Gothic fiction that, more important for his purposes, has surprising analogies to Walker Percy's Lancelot.

And therein lies the problem. Wyatt-Brown urges us forward with the Wares and with Eleanor's daughter, novelist Sarah Catherine Ferguson - whose personal story is the most interesting in the book - to get to Walker and Will Percy. He has a gender theme to pursue: Both male Percy writers were uncomfortable with femaleness, and in their writing that shows. But I wanted the author to linger with the women writers. Walker can get his own due any time. The book has its greatest value as a tantalizing introduction to women whose works may well pay revisiting for many reasons; but in the insistence on getting to Walker, the book sometimes labors its point.

Still, despite this predilection and the odd error of fact or clumsy interpretation, Wyatt-Brown's little book brings some fresh air both to the study of Walker Percy and the lives and works of neglected female authors of more than a century ago. MEMO: Jeffrey Richards is an English professor at Old Dominion University in

Norfolk. ILLUSTRATION: Jacket illustration by MARY J.S. UPSHUR

by CNB