Several months ago, I found myself in small-town Georgia, listening to a career retrospective lecture by Sarah Gordon, one of the most important professors in Flannery O’Connor studies for her work establishing O’Connor’s archives. After interlacing the story of her discovery of O’Connor’s fiction with some of the southern Catholic author’s funniest one-liners, she made a surprising argument, not only to that academic, generally left-leaning audience (I say at the risk of redundancy), but to anyone who was aware of her career as a feminist literary critic. While she had generally attempted to focus simply on what interested her in O’Connor’s short stories and novels, she now argued that…