Why Eudora Welty is not (merely) a regional Southern writer

Read Eudora Welty's "Collected Stories" all through recent vacation through NY state and Pennsylvania, a great collection to read through and to get a sense of Welty's career, world view, and place in literature - secure. A few more stories before I complete the collection, but am now reading through some of her final stories, though her career as a short-story writer is kind of odd, virtually all seemingly compressed into a 15-year span within her long and productive live. In the final collection, The Bride of the Inisfallen, we see Welty trying to expand the scope of her work and continue to try new voices, narrative strategies, and subject matter - not all successfully. I appreciate that she did not want to be pigeonholed as a regionalist - the curse of many Southern (and Western) writers, and her pushing the limits of her form is what makes her greatest stories what they are: elliptical, demanding, subtle, and profound. But she still must have been aware that there are vast areas her fiction never explored, particularly sexual relations and mature adult love relations - and she took on these universal themes in two of the stories in the final collection, the title story and the first in the collection, No Place for You, My Love, two excellent stories and her first foray into The New Yorker. So expanding her scope worked for her and for her career. But not all the stories in the final collection are so strong - Circe, for example, a very weak attempt to tell an episode of the Odyssey in modern voice and from a woman's point of view. Does Welty really add anything to the legend here? In a different vein, the story of the Southern woman who prays for rain and the boy on a fishing expedition with his dad goes back to Welty's more traditional material, but the story feels tedious and meandering - it's as if she had to try this one to know that she'd drawn all she could out of this material. Writers sometimes begin by writing what they know and then develop that material for the rest of their lives - Faulkner, Melville - whereas others use their native ground as a starting point and then move on toward other, more surprising, destinations and challenges.