Features | March 01, 1988
Love
William Faulkner
This feature is not currently available online.
The manuscripts of “Love” reside in the University of Virginia Library, Manuscripts Collection. The 49-page typed version from c. 1921 breaks off on the last page, but a three page autograph fragment, apparently from the same time, provides the story’s conclusion. That three page fragment, while difficult to read because of Faulkner’s peculiar handwriting, corresponds without variation to the story’s ending in the typescript of the later version among the Rowan Oak papers at the University of Mississippi.
In 1921 Beth came across the flagged terrace, her geranium colored dress taut with fury. She was running, then she saw the man in the wicker chair and she slowed to a walk and approached him, repressing the fury although it still lurked in her walk, though not in her voice.
“Hello,” she said, “Dear.”
The man in the chair was methodically sucking tea into himself. A gardener was trimming a box hedge below the pool, a crisp maid fluttered in the purlieus of the sunset at the back of the scene, the invariable feminine complement to whatever picture the man in the chair filled, servants with dreams engendered rosily by Scullery out of Moving Pictures watching him from behind window curtains, daughters of preferred stock and six percent.
If you are a student, faculty member, or staff member at an institution whose library subscribes to Project Muse, you can read this piece and the full archives of the Missouri Review for free. Check this list to see if your library is a Project Muse subscriber.
Want to read more?
Subscribe TodaySEE THE ISSUE
SUGGESTED CONTENT

Foreword
May 17 2022
Foreword: Take Heart
Take Heart Plato banished poets and playwrights from his ideal Republic because he felt they dealt in irrationality and half-truths. Only philosophers, who deal in absolute truths, could occupy his… read more

Curio Cabinet
May 16 2022
Curio Cabinet: Clara Tice and the Art of Being Bohemian
Clara Tice and the Art of Being Bohemian In 1915, Clara Tice became the talk of the town when a series of her nude drawings exhibited at Polly’s Greenwich Village… read more

Art
May 16 2022
Transformations: Creating Character in Contemporary Photography
Transformations: Creating Character in Contemporary Photography Kristine Somerville Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view… read more