Mapped
Absalom, Absalom!
William Faulkner
Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County is drawn from the real Lafayette County, Mississippi, and its county seat, Jefferson, from Oxford, the town where Faulkner lived and is buried. This novel maps the rise and ruin of Thomas Sutpen: his plantation twelve miles out in the county, the town that watched him, and the graves he left. Much of the story is told and retold decades later, some of it from a cold room at Harvard, so the map runs from the courthouse square out into the county and once far north to Cambridge.
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Brideshead Revisited
Evelyn Waugh
Charles Ryder's memoir of the Catholic, aristocratic Flyte family between the wars. It begins in the sunlit Oxford of his undergraduate years, opens out to the vast baroque country house he calls Brideshead, and returns to the London and the faith he cannot leave behind. The map runs from the Oxford quads north to the Yorkshire house that stands in for Brideshead, with the family's town house in St James's and a youthful summer in Venice.
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The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner
The fall of the Compsons, an old Mississippi family, told four times over across three days in 1928 and one in 1910. Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County is drawn from the real Lafayette County, and its town of Jefferson from Oxford, where he lived and is buried. The map grounds the invented county in that ground: the courthouse square, the Compson place, the pasture sold off to a golf course, the branch below it. Quentin's day belongs elsewhere, at Harvard and on the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts, mapped as scenes outside the setting.
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Zuleika Dobson
Max Beerbohm
Oxford in one fatal summer term. A conjuror of dazzling beauty arrives to stay with her grandfather, the head of a college Beerbohm invents but sets in a city he keeps exact, and every undergraduate falls hopelessly in love. The map runs from the colleges of the High to the Sheldonian and Broad Street, then down through Christ Church Meadow to the Isis, where the young men drown themselves during Eights Week. It brings Oxford into the atlas.
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