What Lupus Could Not Silence

By 1955, Flannery O'Connor had already spent five years fighting the disease that killed her father. Diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus in late 1950 at age twenty-five, she had been forced to leave the literary circles of Connecticut and return to Andalusia, her mother's dairy farm outside Milledgeville, Georgia. The cortisone treatments that kept her alive weakened her bones until she needed crutches to walk.…