Sex in the fiction of Eudora Welty

I don't know very much about Eudora Welty's life - I believe she never moved from her family home in Jackson and never married, but I have no idea whether she had any long-term or even short-term partners of either gender - she's of a place and generation in which personal life was private and what's public is only her published work - however, from that published work, it's obvious hat sexuality and sexual relations were a foreign land for her, fraught with strangeness and mystery and fear. Few of her stories, at least in the first two collections in her "Collected Stories," have any sexual themes whatever, but when there is love and passion in her stories it's either mystical and unrequited (A Memory) or full of pain and suffering - At the Landing, her last story in her collection A Wide Net, being a great example. It's a fairly long story, one of the few broken into parts, about a young and very shy woman who lives in apparently one of the grander houses in a backwater town, with her elderly and ill father, neither of them socializing at all with anyone in the community, but when her father dies, a man in town starts paying attention to her, then, during a tremendous flood, rescues her in a boat, feeds her steak and fish he's caught, then, in a scene of about half a sentence, has sex with her. After the flood she goes looking for him, leaves town for the first time, waits for him by the riverside, is brutally raped (again, a scene with no description whatsoever) by a gang of fishermen, end of story. Readers can't help but wonder the extent to which Welty identifies with this protagonist - one of her many lonely, shy, and housebound women, devoted to an ill and elderly man - and what it says about her view of love, sex, and men. Certainly, she is not comfortable with these topics and writes about them only with the greatest indirection or as melodramatic flashes within a thoughtful and atmospheric longer piece.