A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner
Quick answer: A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner: summary with the ending explained, Emily Grierson and Homer Barron, the arsenic, the smell, and the grey hair on the pillow.
When Miss Emily Grierson dies, the whole town of Jefferson goes to her funeral, the men out of respect for a fallen monument and the women to see inside a house no one but an old servant has entered in ten years. William Faulkner published A Rose for Emily in Forum in April 1930 and collected it in These 13 (1931).
It is the most anthologised Faulkner story, taught for an ending that rereads everything before it.
The story in brief, ending included
The town narrator moves back and forth in time. Colonel Sartoris remitted Emily's taxes after her father's death; a newer generation of aldermen calls to collect and is told to see the Colonel, dead ten years. Thirty years earlier a smell had spread from her house, and rather than confront a lady, the aldermen sprinkled lime round her cellar at night. Her father had driven off every suitor; when he died she denied it for three days. Then a Yankee foreman, Homer Barron, came to pave the sidewalks, and the town watched Emily ride out with him on Sundays, pleased and then scandalised.
Emily bought arsenic and refused to say what for; the town assumed suicide. She bought a man's toilet set engraved with Homer's initials. Homer entered the house one evening and was never seen again. Emily gave china-painting lessons for a few years, then closed her doors; only Tobe went in and out. After her death at seventy-four Tobe vanishes, and the townspeople break down the door of a room sealed for forty years. On the bed, in a rotted nightshirt, lies what is left of Homer Barron; on the second pillow is the indentation of a head, and on it a long strand of iron-grey hair.
The characters
Three principals and a town.
Themes: the South that would not bury its dead
The classroom readings are the decay of the Old South, the refusal of time, and the town's complicity in shielding Emily from every consequence out of deference to her name. The rose of the title, never mentioned in the text, is Faulkner's gesture of pity.
The sharper observation is that the narrator's we is the story's real subject. Every fact arrives filtered through what the town saw, guessed and chose not to know, and the final room is as much its secret as hers.
The craft: the order of telling
The five sections run out of order, beginning with the funeral, so the reader holds the death, the smell and the arsenic before learning what connects them. The turn is the purchase of poison, placed so the town's assumption of suicide misdirects the reader too; the ending pays off the smell with a body, and the hair on the pillow turns a murder into something stranger.
The technique to steal is chronological scrambling: give the reader every clue in the wrong order, and let the last detail rearrange them.
For class and essays
Model answers, vocabulary, one misreading.
What writers can take from this
- For exams, reconstruct the chronology first, then explain why Faulkner scrambled it.
- Cite the tax visit and the lime sprinkling as the town's deference and complicity.
- Explain the title as Faulkner's gesture, since no rose appears in the text.
- Writers: deliver clues out of order and let the final detail sort them.
- Give a collective narrator; a town that says we can be both witness and accomplice.
Try it yourself
Write a story narrated by a town in the first person plural about a reclusive neighbour who has just died. Tell it in five sections out of chronological order, planting three clues (a smell, a purchase, a disappearance) whose connection the narrator never states, and end inside a sealed room with a single physical detail that explains everything.
Questions
What happens at the end of A Rose for Emily?
After Emily's funeral the townspeople break into a sealed upstairs room and find Homer Barron's decayed body in the bed. On the pillow beside him lies a long strand of iron-grey hair, showing that Emily slept beside the corpse for years.
Why is the story called A Rose for Emily?
No rose appears in the text. Faulkner said the title was a salute, a gesture of pity toward a woman whose life had been a tragedy, like handing her a rose.
Why is A Rose for Emily told out of order?
Faulkner scatters the smell, the arsenic and the disappearance across five non-chronological sections so the reader cannot connect them until the final image, which rearranges the whole story.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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