There Was a Queen - William Faulkner - 271 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

There Was a Queen was written in 1933 and originated from Faulkner’s novel Sartoris.


The Sartoris family is a sprawling and legendary one , but when the story happens, all the Sartoris men have died except the ten-year-old Benbow, Colonel John’s great great-grandson.


In the old house live Colonel John’s sister Virginia Du Pre, Benbow, his mother Narcissa, Elnora and her son and daughter. Virginia, also called Miss Jenny, came to her brother’s house for a shelter in 1869, after the Yankees killed her father and her husband and burned her house. She has been a widow for more than 60 years.

Elnora, a proud Negro, is the daughter of Colonel John and a black woman and the half-sister of old Bayard, and Miss Jenny is actually her aunt, which is why she is loyal to Sartoris family and has contempt for Narcissa, although her secret identity is probably not known by anyone.

Narcissa is longing for the recognition of Sartoris family, but she can not give up the physical desire as a common woman. In order to regain those love letters which are lost twelve years ago and keep the dignity of being a Sartoris woman, she has to go to Memphis to sleep with the Federal agent so that she can buy those letters back with her own body.


After she returns, she does not immediately explain the sudden journey, and in the early afternoon she takes her son to go down across the pasture towards the creek. After Narcissa is back and changes her wet clothes, she comes to explain her sudden journey to Miss Jenny. At first Miss Jenny has thought that she might marry someone, even that Yankee, but her explanation makes her startled. After Narcissa confesses all of these things to Miss Jenny, this old woman passes away quietly. These three women, to some extent, are worthy and pathetic. They live in this unmanned house in order to defend the old and decaying tradition, which symbolises the Southern society and order, and at the same time they repress their natural humanity and come to the end of life in loneliness and emptiness.

Adapted from Faulkner Archive