Description
"Faulkner and Love" is a critical biography and family narrative about William Faulkner and three of the most important women in his life: his mother, Maud Butler Falkner (1871-1960), his black nurse, Caroline Barr (c. 1850-1940), and his wife, Lida Estelle Oldham (1897-1972). This is the first primary biography to include serious full-scale biographical narratives of his mother, his wife, and Caroline Barr. With access to relevant family papers and permission from Faulkner's executor and others to quote from them. In all previous Faulkner biographies, the driven, lonely, misunderstood genius, the Great American Writer, is judged ultimately a magnificent Artist who succeeded despite two fatal obsessions: alcohol and Estelle. While there is some truth to this romantic myth, we need greater accuracy. The difficult, talented, and articulate women who nurtured him, and with whom he later chose to live his life, have been distorted, marginalized, and flattened to psychobabble. This seeks a more balanced approach, and takes lead from his art. There, racial, family, and erotic relationships are central, and women and men are portrayed as people, not caricatures. The interest is Faulkner's and these women's relations both to each other and to their particular North Mississippi rural town culture. Like Faulkner's fictional narratives, the overlapping historical periods in which this work is set are conceived as interactions among structures, processes, and people. These structres and processes mold and shape Caroline, Maud, Estelle, and William. This constant interaction of forces creates the drama of their lives, one that nourishes the core fantasies of Faulkner's fiction, from perception of and participation in that actual human drama.
