Richard Gray
The Maternal Imaginary
Faulkner and Love: The Women Who Shaped His Art
By Judith L Sensibar
Yale University Press 624pp £25 order from our bookshop
‘Every word a writing man writes’, observes one of William Faulkner’s characters, ‘is put down with the intention of impressing some woman.’ Faulkner thought so too. Women occupied the centre of his life and imagination, and this book is an attempt to register the centrality of three women in particular: his mother Maud Butler Falkner, his black ‘mother’ Caroline Barr, and his wife Estelle Oldham Faulkner. It is, its author explains, an ‘account of the origins, growth, and fruition of Faulkner’s creativity in a racialized maternal imaginary’.
That explanation is, unfortunately, typical; the promising topic of Faulkner and love is frequently buried under the weight of theoretical jargon. There are other problems. Judith Sensibar claims, for instance, that her approach is groundbreaking. Previous Faulkner biographies, she suggests, have underestimated the importance of women in his
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Surveillance, facial recognition and control: my review of @jonfasman's "We See It All" https://literaryreview.co.uk/watching-the-watchers via @Lit_Review
I reviewed Diary of a Film by Niven Govinden for @Lit_Review https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-directors-cut
'Retired judges have usually had long careers on the bench, during which they have acquired an ingrained reticence when it comes to speaking on controversial topics. Not so Sumption.'
Dominic Grieve reviews Jonathan Sumption's 'Law in a Time of Crisis'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-case-for-the-citizen