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Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow, born in Richmond, VA, on 22 April 1873, published her first novel, The Descendant, in 1897, when she was 24 years old. With this novel, Glasgow began a literary career encompassing four and a half decades that was comprised of 20 novels, a collection of poems, short stories, and a book of literary criticism. Her autobiography, A Woman Within, was published posthumously in 1954.

Biography

Born into an aristocratic Virginia family, the young Glasgow rebelled against the conventional modes of feminine conduct and thought approved by her caste. Due to poor health, she was educated at home at One West Main Street in Richmond where she engaged in energetic readings of philosophy, social and political theory, and European and British literature. She spent her summers recuperating at her family's Bumpass, Virginia estate, the historic Jerdone Castle plantation, a venue that reappears in her writings. Her father was the manager of Tredegar Iron Works, and to Glasgow he appeared self-righteous and unfeeling. Nevertheless, some of her more admirable characters reflect a Scots-Calvinist background like his and a similar "iron vein of Presbyterianism." Her mother, a lady of the Virginia aristocracy, declined to nervous invalidism after bearing ten children, and Glasgow also combated the same "nervous invalidism" throughout her life.

During the rise of American Women's Suffrage in the 1900s, Glasgow marched in the English Suffrage parades in spring 1909 and later spoke at the first suffrage meeting in Virginia. Glasgow, however, felt that the movement came "at the wrong moment" for her and her interest in the cause waned. Glasgow did not at first make women’s roles her major theme, and she was slow to place heroines rather than heroes at the centers of the stories. Her later works, however, have heroines that display many of the attributes of women involved in this movement.

Ellen Glasgow had several love interests during her life. In The Woman Within (1954), an autobiography written for posthumous publication, Glasgow tells of a long, secret affair with a married man she had met in New York, whom she called "Gerald B." Ellen also maintained a close lifelong friendship with James Branch Cabell, another notable Richmond writer. She was engaged twice, even collaborating on novels with one fiancé, but did not marry. She felt her best work was done when love was over.

A popular writer, Glasgow was on the best-seller lists five times. In 1942 she received the Pulitzer Prize for her last published novel, In This Our Life, though by this time her powers had declined. Her artistic recognition had reached its height in 1931 when, as the acknowledged doyenne of southern letters, she presided over the Southern Writers Conference at the University of Virginia. For many years the victim of heart disease, she died in her sleep at home in Richmond on 21 November 1945.

Time Magazine, in 1923, captured the essence of Glasgow: "She is of the South; but she is not by any manner of means provincial. She was educated, being a delicate child, at home and at private schools. Yet she is by no means a woman secluded from life. She has wide contacts and interests. . . . Here is a really important figure in the history of American letters; for she has preserved for us the quality and the beauty of her real South.'

Works

Glasgow's strong intellect led her to a conscious channeling of her creative energies toward the making of a substantial body of fiction. The framework of these works was to be her view of the social history of Virginia. Her major topics include the conflicts between tradition and change, matter and spirit, and the individual and society. Her use of realism and irony fashioned a new southern fiction to take the place of the sentimental stories of glorified aristocratic past that dominated the regional fiction of her day. Through her poor white heroes and heroines, she introduced democratic values seldom found in the works of other southern writers outside of Mark Twain. From the very beginning of her intellectual and creative life, she rejected Victorian definitions of femininity dominating the social attitudes of her day.

Glasgow's first novel, The Descendant (1897) was written in secret and published anonymously. She destroyed part of the manuscript after her mother died in 1893 and it was further delayed when her brother-in-law and intellectual mentor, George McCormack, died the following year. It was not until the emotional distress caused by those two deaths passed that she returned to her novel, completing it in 1895.The novel features an emancipated heroine who seeks passion rather than marriage. Although it was published anonymously, the novel's authorship became well known the following year, when her second novel, Phases of an Inferior Planet, (1898) announced on its title page, “by Ellen Glasgow, author of The Descendant.”

By the time The Descendant was in print, Glasgow had finished Phases of an Inferior Planet. The novel chronicles the demise of a marriage and focuses on "the spirituality of female friendship." Critics found the story to be "sodden with hopelessness all the way though," but "excellently told." Glasgow stated that her third novel, The Voice of People (1900) was an objective view of the poor-white farmer in politics. The hero is a young Southerner who, having a genius for politics, rises above the masses and falls in love with a girl on a higher socio-economic scale. Her next novel,The Battle-Ground (1902)sold over 21,000 copies in the first two weeks after publication. It depicts the South before and during the Civil War and was hailed as "the first and best realistic treatment of the war from the southern point of view." The Deliverance (1904) is considered the best of her early novels as it offers a naturalistic treatment of the class conflicts emerging after the Civil War. This novel and her previous novel, The Battle-Ground, were written during her affair with Gerald B. and they "are the only early books in which Glasgow's heroine and hero are united" by the novels' ends.

Glasgow's next four novels were written in what she considered her "earlier manner" and were received with mixed reviews. The Wheel of Life (1906) sold moderately well based on the success of The Descendant. Despite it's commercial success, however, reviewers found the book disappointing. Set in New York, the story tells of domestic unhappiness and tangled love affairs. It was unfavorably compared to Edith Wharton's House of Mirth, which was published that same year. Most critics recommended that Glasgow “stick to the South.” Glasgow herself regarded the novel a failure. The Ancient Law (1908) centers on white factory workers in the Virginia textile industry, and analyzes the rise of industrial capitalism and its corresponding social ills. This book also failed to capture the admiration of the critics, who found it to be overly melodramatic. With The Romance of a Plain Man (1909) and The Miller of Old Church (1911) Glasgow began focusing on gender traditions; contrasting the righteous convention of the Southern woman with the feminist viewpoint, a direction which she continued in Virginia (1913)

In what is known as her women's trilogy— Virginia (1913), Life and Gabriella (1916), and Barren Ground (1925)—Glasgow assigns each of her Virginian heroines a fate determined by her response to the patriarchal code of feminine behavior

In Virginia (1913) the protagonist is a woman, though not a rebel. Virginia Pendleton, based on Glasgow’s mother, is an old-fashioned southern lady raised on “the simple theory that the less a girl knew about life, the better prepared she would be to contend with it.” The author was capable of irony about such figures, sustained by illusion, at times controlling through weakness. Blind Mrs. Blake in The Deliverance (1904) is protected by her family from knowing the Civil War is lost and the slaves freed. But Virginia is treated sympathetically, even idealized, as Glasgow tended to idealize all her heroines.

The author depicted a new kind of woman that feminism and confidence in evolution made her believe possible. She had difficulty, though, imagining a woman’s life that combined love and work. The feminine quality of sympathy which made a heroine worthy of interest would lead her, like Judith Campbell in “The Professional Instinct,” to choose love over ambition.

that had formed her, a code that, as Glasgow shows so well in Barren Ground, always pitted women against their own biological natures. After Barren Ground, which marked her arrival at artistic maturity, Glasgow produced three sparkling comedies of manners— The Romantic Comedians (1926), They Stooped to Folly (1929), and The Sheltered Life (1932), the last the author's finest work. In these novels of urban Virginian life depicting the clash of generations, she again shows her women characters reacting to patriarchal stereotypes limiting their individuality and growth, while at the same time exposing either with comic or with satiric irony the limitations these views of women place on the male characters who hold them.

The novel of greatest personal importance to the author was Barren Ground (1925), in which she felt she had reversed the traditional seduction plot. When Glasgow’s heroines are strong, they are so only because men are weak, and the women’s victories are sad triumphs. She thought that writing Barren Ground, a “tragedy,” freed her for the comedies of manners The Romantic Comedians (1926), They Stooped to Folly (]]1929]]), and The Sheltered Life (1932). These late works are the most artful criticism of romantic illusion in all her long career. Linda Pannill Transylvania University The Heath Anthology of American Literature Volumes A, B, C, D, and E, Fifth Edition

References

Auchincloss, Louis. Ellen Glasgow. Vol. 33. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1964.
Becker, Allen Wilkins. Ellen Glasgow: Her Novels and their Place in the Development of Southern Fiction. Baltimore, MD:Johns Hopkins University Master's Thesis, 1956.
Cooper, Frederic Taber. Some American Story Tellers. New York: H. Holt and Company, 1911.
Donovan, Josephine. After the fall the Demeter-Persephone myth in Wharton, Cather, and Glasgow. U Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1989.
Godbold, Jr., E. Stanley. Ellen Glasgow and the Woman Within, 1972
Goodman, Susan. Ellen Glasgow: A Biography. Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
Holman, C. Hugh. Three Modes of Modern Southern Fiction: Ellen Glasgow, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe. Vol. 9. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1966. Inge, M. Thomas, and Mary Baldwin College. Ellen Glasgow: Centennial Essays. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976.
Jessup, Josephine Lurie. The Faith of our Feminists. New York: R. R. Smith, 1950.
Jones, Anne Goodwyn. Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859-1936, 1981
MacDonald , Edgar and Tonette Blond Inge. Ellen Glasgow: A Reference Guide (1897-1981), 1986
Mathews, Pamela R. Ellen Glasgow and a Woman's Traditions, 1994 McDowell, Frederick P. W. Ellen Glasgow and the Ironic Art of Fiction. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1960. Pannill, Linda in The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Vol. D. eds Patterson, Martha H. Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895-1915. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2005.
Publishers' Bindings Online. Accessed 17 May 2009
Raper, Julius R. From the Sunken Garden: The Fiction of Ellen Glasgow, 1916-1945. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1980.
Raper, Julius Rowan, and Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow. Without Shelter;the Early Career of Ellen Glasgow. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971.
Reuben, Paul P. Chapter 7: Ellen Glasgow. PAL: Perspectives in American Literature-A Research and Reference Guide. Accessed 4 Apr 2009.
Richards, Marion K. Ellen Glasgow's Development as a Novelist. Vol. 24. The Hague: Mouton, 1971.
Rouse, Blair. Ellen Glasgow. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1962.
Rubin, Louis Decimus. No Place on Earth;Ellen Glasgow, James Branch Cabell, and Richmond-in-Virginia. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1959.
Santas, Joan Foster. Ellen Glasgow's American Dream. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1965.
Saunders, Catherine E. Writing the Margins: Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, and the Literary Tradition of the Ruined Woman. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987.
Scura, Dorothy M. ed. Ellen Glasgow: New Perspectives. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1995.
Thiebaux, Marcelle. Ellen Glasgow. NY: Ungar, 1982.
Tutwiler, Carringon C., and University of Virginia Bibliographical Society. Ellen Glasgow's Library. Charlottesville, VA: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 1967.
Wagner, Linda W. Ellen Glasgow: Beyond Convention. Austin U of Texas P, 1982.