The Southern Literary Journal

Judith L. Sensibar's Faulkner and Love is a revisionist, paradigm-shifting biography with strongly feminist underpinnings, and as such, is sure to be a subject of contention among the gatekeepers of Faulkner studies. In a crowded and ever-growing field, this is a remarkable, original work of scholarship whose sources for the first time reach into African American communal history. The product of twenty-five years of sleuthing, it couples rock-solid and previously uncovered research in primary documents and oral histories—by both blacks and whites—with provocative, sometimes speculative, critical analysis. It is also a riveting read, capturing the motion and flow of the writer's baby years, his life as a boy and young man—shaped both by his white and black "mothers," Maud Falkner and Caroline "Callie" Barr—and his mature years up to 1933, strongly influenced by his much maligned wife, Estelle. Sensibar's larger argument is three-fold: that serious attention must be paid to Faulkner's long-lasting and most basic relationships with these women, that his conflicted aesthetic impulses around race came directly from the vexed relationships with his white and black "mothers," and that his art was directly influenced by Maud's painting and especially by Estelle's early fiction. In short, Sensibar reconceptualizes [End Page 135] Faulkner's creative evolution "as a web and series of imaginative collaborations" with the women whose lives he shared over huge swaths of his life.

The style of the book is, in itself, worth noting and well suited to its subject and these interwoven, overlapping relationships, not only these women's with Faulkner but also their complicated connections with one another. Eschewing far-flung flights of rhetoric that are often a byproduct of writing about Faulkner, Sensibar's prose is stalwart and straight-forward, awash in vivid detail. The narrative of the book ebbs and flows, with eddies of thought and connection, fits and starts, smooth streams and rapids—appropriately, much like the trajectory of a life. It also seems a bit like a puzzle. Sensibar works piece by piece to fill in gaps in our knowledge of Faulkner's history, especially regarding the influences of these three women. Larger sections of the book are subdivided into scores of smaller segments, each with its own bits of detail, nuance, and emphasis. The effect is that readers can pick this book up at any point and follow its argument; each piece of the puzzle is placed alongside the others. There is repetition, but, in such a long and complexly wrought work, it is helpful rather than tedious. There are numerous photos, genealogical charts, maps—many of them new to Faulkner scholarship.

The first section of the book, which focuses on Caroline Barr, is especially compelling, and the portrait that emerges is much clearer than any prior accounts of this small bossy African American woman, who killed snakes with the flick of a switch, walked eight hundred miles after the Civil War, spoke Gullah, told young Willie and his brothers elaborate animal tales, visited her niece's "jook joint," and "always kept a knife in her pocket." This clarity is largely due to interviews with Barr's Mississippi family members by Sensibar's African American graduate assistant, Patricia Tingle, who was able to overcome suspicions that would have been aroused by a white nonsouthern interviewer to acquire information about the family and Barr—a method Sensibar admits was not as straightforward as it might have been, but argues was necessary. As to Callie's mysterious history, Sensibar moves among fragmented and sometimes contradictory clues in her search for origins she is never able to fully nail down, for a number of reasons: Caroline Barr was a slave in a time when slaves were often listed as numbers; she moved often and probably eluded census takers; she was illiterate and never owned property. Even her age is disputed, though Sensibar convincingly judges Barr 107 at her death. Sensibar challenges depictions of...