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 PLOT
 The story, told in five sections in retrospect, opens in section one
with an unnamed narrator describing the funeral of Miss Emily
Grierson.
 The narrator always refers to himself in collective pronouns; he
is perceived as being the voice of the average citizen of the town
of Jefferson.
 He notes that while the men attend the funeral out of obligation,
the women go primarily because no one has been inside Emily’s
house for years.
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 The narrator describes what was once a grand house ‘‘set on
what had once been our most select street.’’ Emily’s origins
are aristocratic, but both her house and the neighborhood it
is in have deteriorated.
 This is because Colonel Sartoris, the former mayor of the
town, remitted Emily’s taxes dating from the death of her
father “on into perpetuity.’’ Apparently, Emily’s father left
her with nothing when he died. Colonel Sartoris invented a
story explaining the remittance of Emily’s taxes (it is the
town’s method of paying back a loan to her father) to save
her from the embarrassment of accepting charity.
 PLOT
 In a flashback, the narrator goes the first important
episode in Emily’s l;ife which takes place a decade
before Emily’s death. A new generation of politicians
takes over Jefferson’s government. They are
unmoved by Colonel Sartoris’s decision to exempt
Emily from taxes, and they attempt to collect taxes
from her. She ignores their notices and letters.
Finally, the Board of Aldermen sends a deputation to
discuss the situation with her.
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The men are led into a shabby parlor by Emily’s black
man-servant, Tobe. The first physical description of
Emily is unflattering: she is ‘‘a small, fat woman in
black” who looks “bloated, like a body long
submerged in motionless water.” Emily repeatedly
insists that she has no taxes in Jefferson and tells the
men to see Colonel Sartoris. The narrator notes that
Colonel Sartoris has been dead at that point for
almost ten years. She sends the men away from her
house with nothing.
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Section II
 Eighty-year-old Judge Stevens is approached by townspeople
about the smell on Miss Emily’s property.

 Miss Emily sends the deputation away, just as she had sent a
similar party away thirty years earlier when neighbors had
begun to complain to the town about a “smell” that had risen
from Miss Emily’s property. The smell was noticed two years
after Miss Emily’s father died and a short time after her
sweetheart deserted her.
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Section III
 Homer Barron, Miss Emily’s boyfriend who is described as a “big, dark,
ready man, with a big voice and eyes lighter than his face.” is a Northerner,
he has come south to Jefferson as a foreman helping to pave the sidewalks.
 After her father’s death, Miss Emily disappeared from public site for a long
time, and when she reemerged, Jefferson had just started paving its
sidewalks. That time she met Homer and started going out with him. She
was thirty years old.
 Some people of the town were happy, but the women were skeptic because
“a Grierson would never think of a Northerner.”
 Miss Emily orders the local druggist to sell her arsenic, even though she
refused to tell him what the poison is for.
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Section IV
 At the request of the Baptist minister’s wife, Miss Emily’s
cousins from Alabama arrive and move in with Miss Emily,
presumably to help her out.

 After Miss Emily had requested rat poison from the druggist,
the town assumed that she was planning her own suicide. The
facts of her relationship with Homer Barron, a Northerner, was
too great a disgrace in the town’s eyes, and suicide seemed a
viable option.
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 Although Miss Emily and Homer were seen regularly on

Sunday afternoons, the town was uncertain about Homer’s
intention because he was not a marrying man.
 Miss Emily was seen buying men’s clothing and nightshirts.
The assumption was that they were going to get married.
 After the pavement finished, Homer was seen few times and
upon a visit to Emily he disappeared.
 Miss Emily withdraw forever from public life till she died at the
age of seventy four.
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Section V
 When news of Miss Emily’s death spreads, a group of ladies from the
town arrives at Miss Emily’s door and is briefly greeted by Tobe, who lets
them in and immediately proceeds to walk out the back door, never to be
seen again.
 A funeral is held two days later, with several of the men wearing their
newly brushed Confederate uniforms.
 There was one room upstairs in Miss Emily’s house which on one had
seen in forty years. After the burial, the people of the town forced the
room open.
 A Skelton was lying there with a with grin, and next to it there was
indentation on the second pillow.