Just when you thought 2015 had already met its long-lost literature quota, along comes a new William Faulkner play. The AP reports that a never-before-published Faulkner play has been unearthed at the University of Virginia and published for the first time in The Strand magazine’s holiday issue out now. Titled Twixt Cup and Lip, the one-act comedy was written just after WWI when Faulkner was in his 20s. It follows “a modern, free-thinking woman [who] finds herself courted by two men and changes her mind at the last moment.” “This work is unique in that it showed a side of Faulkner that was comical yet that at the same time explored the nascent theme of the independent jazz-era female which F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker carried on further,” says The Strand’s managing editor Andrew Gulli, who found the play. A Faulkner historian believes that the play may have been inspired by his wife Estelle Oldham, whose parents pressured her to marry another man instead of Faulkner, her childhood sweetheart. The play essentially reimagines their love story as one in which Oldham defied her parents and chose Faulkner first. Awwwww.
