I am in awe of Flannery O'Connor's faith in her own work

Got a kick out of reading some of the Flannery O'Connor letters re "Wise Blood" in the Library of America O'Connor edition. Unsurprisingly, she's a really funny and sharp-witted correspondent, who uses her mother as a comic foil (She: You would read a book called The Idiot. What's it about? Me: An idiot). Letter writing, a great lost art. A few striking things: First, O'Connor writes to several correspondents that Wise Blood is a novel about redemption in various guises, though not Catholic redemption (her faith). Again, I'm so struck by this - would readers perceive or comprehend this without O'Connor's guidance? Does it really feel as if Hazel has been redeemed by his suffering? As in everything, O'Connor's vision is unique and perverse, and I think it's fair to say that no other writer in the world who set forth to write a tale of Christian redemption would come up with anything like this one - in which the characters, to me at least, seem unremittingly lost and sinful and obsessed. Second: these letters again remind us that the image of O'Connor as a bumpkin or idiot savant, living down there in Georgia and out of touch with the world, are completely false. Easy to underestimate her. She was in regular contact with a lot of literary figures (lowell, robert fitzgerald), was a star at the Iowa Writers Workshop whose work was recognized early (though oddly one of her mentors insisted on reading her stories to the seminars himself, afraid others couldn't plumb her Georgia accent - what an egotist!). Finally: I am in awe of the faith O'Connor had in her own work, confidently blowing off a publisher (Rinehart) who wanted her to change the manuscript. She knew from the start that her novel was unconventional and she never wavered in that belief nor in her belief in her own vision and talent, uniquely hers - and of course history has shown her to be right.