University of Mississippi in Absalom, Absalom! (Location)

The University of Mississippi opened in 1844, fifteen years before Henry Sutpen and Charles Bon meet there. According to Mr. Compson, in 1859 it is "a small new college in the Mississippi hinterland" (58). The "grove at the University" where Mr. Compson speculates Henry first sees Bon is a real part of the campus (76). The two young men both attend the Law School, which opened in 1854. In the novel, as in fact, the University is in Oxford, Mississippi, which is "forty miles" from Sutpen's Hundred (249). Faulkner is also from Oxford, which is widely recognized as the original on which much of his imagined Jefferson is based, but Jefferson has no university nearby, and throughout the Yoknapatawpha fictions he puts more or less forty miles between Jefferson and both the University of Mississippi and the town of Oxford. Characters in different novels use horses or trains or cars to travel between Jefferson and Oxford, but the direction they travel remains unspecified, as if Faulkner deliberately wants to make it impossible to know exactly how to get from the real place he lived in to the one he invented.