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this only child.
O’C ONNOR WAS BORN into a clan of strong women, beginning with the family of her mother, the regally named Regina Lucille Cline. She was undoubtedly thinking of her mother’s side of the family when writing to a friend of her relatives, “I don’t think mine have ever been in a world they couldn’t cope with because none of them that I know of have left the 19th century.” Known around the region as “Old Catholic,” both the Cline and Flannery families could be traced back to the Irish Treanors and Hartys, who settled, in the late eighteenth century, in old Locust Grove, in Taliaferro County, Georgia.
Flannery’s great-grandfather Hugh Donnelly Treanor, who emigrated from county Tipperary in 1824, had a reputation for being well read. He developed a prosperous water-powered grist mill on the Oconee River in Milledgeville, in central Georgia, which became the family seat; as O’Connor later reported in a letter from Milledgeville, “Mass was first said here in my great-grandfather’s hotel room, later in his home on the piano.” After Hugh Treanor died, his widow, O’Connor’s great-grandmother Johannah Harty Treanor, also Irish-born, settled with her family in the Locust Grove community. She donated the land on which Sacred Heart, the Catholic church at the corner of Hancock and Jefferson streets in Milledgeville, was built in 1874.
One of Hugh Treanor’s daughters, Kate, married Peter J. Cline, a successful dry-goods store owner in Milledgeville, and when she died, her sister, Margaret Ida, married him, in turn. The two bore a total of sixteen children, with Regina, born in 1896, being the second-youngest daughter of the second family. Like Haze’s father in a draft of
Wise Blood,
Peter Cline’s father was a humble Latin scholar, a schoolteacher in Augusta. Peter’s wealth sufficiently trumped his oddity as a small-town Irish Catholic to allow him to buy an antebellum mansion in Milledgeville soon after the Civil War, to be unanimously elected its mayor in 1889, and to have his every movement covered in the local paper: he set off “a grand pyrotechnic display” in front of his home on Christmas Eve 1890, and left town “for the northern markets” in March 1903.
As a young daughter of a first family in town, Regina was often sassy. One afternoon when she was walking with some girlfriends, a laborer rolling a wagon along the street called out to her, “Little girl, what you got in your bag?” She snapped her blond head about and startled her playmates by shouting back, “I’ve got the biscuits. Have you got the honey?” After elementary school, she went away to Mount St. Joseph Boarding and Day School for Girls, in Augusta, a convent school supported with funding from its alumna Katie Semmes, who paid for the school’s own Flannery Hall, and whose aunt, Mother Gabriel, served as its Mother Superior. At her high school graduation, in May 1916, Regina recited a Latin poem, “Fortiter et Recte,” while her younger sister, Agnes, graduating as well, played a piano selection from Wagner’s
Die Meistersinger.
Of a visit at age four to the school, O’Connor later wrote to her friend Father James McCown: “I don’t know anybody in Augusta. I visited there once when I was four — at the convent where my cousin was Mother Superior and celebrating her something-or-other jubilee. They had ice cream for dessert in the shape of calla lilies. That was the only time I was ever tempted to join an order — I thought they ate that way every day.”
This childhood visit impressed her enough for Mount St. Joseph to be echoed in the name Mount St. Scholastica in her story “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.” The rest of the description of its fictional double resembled Sacred Heart Academy, located in downtown Augusta on Ellis Street. It was a redbrick house set back in a garden in the center of town, surrounded by a high black grillwork fence.
A protracted six years after graduation,
O’C ONNOR WAS BORN into a clan of strong women, beginning with the family of her mother, the regally named Regina Lucille Cline. She was undoubtedly thinking of her mother’s side of the family when writing to a friend of her relatives, “I don’t think mine have ever been in a world they couldn’t cope with because none of them that I know of have left the 19th century.” Known around the region as “Old Catholic,” both the Cline and Flannery families could be traced back to the Irish Treanors and Hartys, who settled, in the late eighteenth century, in old Locust Grove, in Taliaferro County, Georgia.
Flannery’s great-grandfather Hugh Donnelly Treanor, who emigrated from county Tipperary in 1824, had a reputation for being well read. He developed a prosperous water-powered grist mill on the Oconee River in Milledgeville, in central Georgia, which became the family seat; as O’Connor later reported in a letter from Milledgeville, “Mass was first said here in my great-grandfather’s hotel room, later in his home on the piano.” After Hugh Treanor died, his widow, O’Connor’s great-grandmother Johannah Harty Treanor, also Irish-born, settled with her family in the Locust Grove community. She donated the land on which Sacred Heart, the Catholic church at the corner of Hancock and Jefferson streets in Milledgeville, was built in 1874.
One of Hugh Treanor’s daughters, Kate, married Peter J. Cline, a successful dry-goods store owner in Milledgeville, and when she died, her sister, Margaret Ida, married him, in turn. The two bore a total of sixteen children, with Regina, born in 1896, being the second-youngest daughter of the second family. Like Haze’s father in a draft of
Wise Blood,
Peter Cline’s father was a humble Latin scholar, a schoolteacher in Augusta. Peter’s wealth sufficiently trumped his oddity as a small-town Irish Catholic to allow him to buy an antebellum mansion in Milledgeville soon after the Civil War, to be unanimously elected its mayor in 1889, and to have his every movement covered in the local paper: he set off “a grand pyrotechnic display” in front of his home on Christmas Eve 1890, and left town “for the northern markets” in March 1903.
As a young daughter of a first family in town, Regina was often sassy. One afternoon when she was walking with some girlfriends, a laborer rolling a wagon along the street called out to her, “Little girl, what you got in your bag?” She snapped her blond head about and startled her playmates by shouting back, “I’ve got the biscuits. Have you got the honey?” After elementary school, she went away to Mount St. Joseph Boarding and Day School for Girls, in Augusta, a convent school supported with funding from its alumna Katie Semmes, who paid for the school’s own Flannery Hall, and whose aunt, Mother Gabriel, served as its Mother Superior. At her high school graduation, in May 1916, Regina recited a Latin poem, “Fortiter et Recte,” while her younger sister, Agnes, graduating as well, played a piano selection from Wagner’s
Die Meistersinger.
Of a visit at age four to the school, O’Connor later wrote to her friend Father James McCown: “I don’t know anybody in Augusta. I visited there once when I was four — at the convent where my cousin was Mother Superior and celebrating her something-or-other jubilee. They had ice cream for dessert in the shape of calla lilies. That was the only time I was ever tempted to join an order — I thought they ate that way every day.”
This childhood visit impressed her enough for Mount St. Joseph to be echoed in the name Mount St. Scholastica in her story “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.” The rest of the description of its fictional double resembled Sacred Heart Academy, located in downtown Augusta on Ellis Street. It was a redbrick house set back in a garden in the center of town, surrounded by a high black grillwork fence.
A protracted six years after graduation,
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