Anthony West. “Requiem for a Dramatist.” New Yorker, September 22, 1951, pp. 109–12.

Mr. Faulkner's new offering, Requiem for a Nun, is in the main a sequel to Sanctuary, and is concerned with the further misadventures of Temple Drake, a tomboy whose qualities have always had an unsettling effect on her creator. Even for the heroine of a novel of violence in the heyday of the genre, she was experienceprone to an unusual degree: Between the time she slipped off the train at Taylor and the time she was to be seen yawning at the watery charms of the Luxembourg Gardens on a wet autumn day, a good deal had happened to her. She had been in an automobile wreck, she had been involved in two murders, she had been raped in a manner new to the novel, and raped old-style by proxy, she had been kidnapped and held prisoner in a Memphis brothel, and she had committed perjury that resulted in an innocent man's being burned to death by a mob. It may seem that fate, playing fair, could not have had more in store for a simple Southern girl. But it did.

We now learn that after a year in Europe, Temple went decked in virgin's white to the American Embassy in Paris and there married up with Gowan Stevens, the well-bred lush whose bout of drinking landed her in her mess of trouble. She added to that slightly incredible step the wholly incredible one of returning to Jefferson, her home town and the county seat, to settle down.