THE FIRST phrase of Toni Morrison’s first book, Bluest Eye (1970), is “Nuns go by as quiet as lust”.

The Australian writer Michael McGirr tells us that Morrison, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist who died last week at the age of 88, thought deeply about the spiritual foundations of her craft. “If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning,” Morrison wrote, “it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.”

Morrison spent a lifetime drawing poison from the wounds of black America. “She wrote as the heiress of a heavy fortune, the suffering of her family and people, and she invested that fortune in a profound search for truth, wisdom and healing,” writes McGirr.

The Bluest Eye took five years to write and did not receive much attention. Morrison recalls the story of a beautiful girl who said that she had definite proof that God could not exist. The proof was that she had been praying for two years to have blue eyes and God had not answered her request. This was a turning point for Morrison. She knew at once that it would have been a tragedy if God had changed the girl’s eyes. The sorrow was that she could not see her own beauty.