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Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow (April 22, 1873-November 21, 1945) was a Pulitzer Prize winning American novelist. Born in Richmond, VA, she 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 comprised 20 novels, a collection of poems, short stories, and a book of literary criticism. Her autobiography, A Woman Within, appeared posthumously in 1954.^[1]

Ellen Glasgow, 1906

Biography

Born into an aristocratic Virginia family, the young Glasgow rebelled against the conventional modes of feminine conduct and thought approved by her caste.^[2] 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.^[3] 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.^[4] Nevertheless, some of her more admirable characters reflect a Scots-Calvinist background like his and a similar "iron vein of Presbyterianism."^[5] Her mother, a lady of the Virginia aristocracy, declined to nervous invalidism after bearing ten children,^[6] 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.^[7] Glasgow, however, felt that the movement came "at the wrong moment" for her and her interest in the cause waned.^[8] 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.^[9] 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."^[10] 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.^[11]

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. ^[12] Glasgow is buried in Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia.

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.' ^[13]

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.^[14] Her major topics include the conflicts between tradition and change, matter and spirit, and the individual and society.^[15] 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.^[16] 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.^[17]

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.^[18]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.^[19] The novel chronicles the demise of a marriage and focuses on "the spirituality of female friendship."^[20] Critics found the story to be "sodden with hopelessness all the way though,"^[21] but "excellently told."^[22] Glasgow stated that her third novel, The Voice of People (1900) was an objective view of the poor-white farmer in politics.^[23] 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.^[24] 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."^[25] 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.^[26] 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.^[27]

Glasgow's next four novels were written in what she considered her "earlier manner" ^[28] 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. ^[29] Set in New York, the story tells of domestic unhappiness and tangled love affairs.^[30] 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.”^[31] Glasgow herself regarded the novel a failure.^[32] The Ancient Law (1908) centers on white factory workers in the Virginia textile industry,^[33] and analyzes the rise of industrial capitalism and its corresponding social ills.^[34] This book also failed to capture the admiration of the critics, who found it to be overly melodramatic.^[35] 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,^[36] 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.^[37] In Virginia (1913) the title protagonist is southern lady whose husband abandons her when he achieves success. The protagonist in Life and Gabriella is also abandoned by a weak-willed husband, but Gabriella becomes a self-sufficient, single-mother who conventionally marries well by the end of the novel. Glasgow published two more novels, The Builders (1919) and One Man in His Time (1922) as well a set of short stories (The Shadowy Third and Other Stories (1923) before producing the novel of greatest personal importance, Barren Ground (1925. In this storyline, Glasgow felt she had successfully reversed the traditional seduction plot by producing a heroine completely freed from the southern patriarchal influence. She believed that writing Barren Ground, a “tragedy,” also freed her for her comedies of manners The Romantic Comedians (1926), They Stooped to Folly (1929), and The Sheltered Life (1932). These late works are considered the most artful criticism of romantic illusion in her career.^[38]

Glasgow produced two more "novels of character"^[39], The Sheltered Life (1932) and Vein of Iron (1935) in which she continued to explore female independence. Her autobiography, The Woman Within details her progression as an author and the influences essential for her becoming an acclaimed Southern woman writer.

Select bibliography

Novels

• The Descendant (1897)
• Phases of an Inferior Planet (1898)
• The Voice of the People (1900)
• The Battle-Ground (1902)
• The Deliverance (1904)
• The Wheel of Life (1906)
• The Romance of a Plain Man (1909)
• Virginia (1913)
• The Builders (1919)
• The Past (novel) (1920)
• One Man In His Time (novel) (1922)
• Barren Ground (1925)
• The Romantic Comedians (1926)
• They Stooped to Folly (1929)
• The Sheltered Life (1932)
• Vein of Iron (1935)
• In This Our Life (1941) (Pulitzer Prize for the Novel 1942) (filmed 1942 as In This Our Life)

Collections

• The Shadowy Third, and Other Stories (1923)^[40]
• The Collected Stories of Ellen Glasgow (12 stories (pp. 24-253), with an introduction by the editor (pp. 3-23))^[41]

Autobiography

• The Woman Within (published posthumously in 1954)

Notes

1. ^ Inge 883
2. ^ Inge 883
3. ^ Heath
4. ^ Glasgow 12-3
5. ^ Glasgow 14
6. ^ Goodman 19
7. ^ Glasgow 185-6
8. ^ Glasgow 186
9. ^ Pannill 686
10. ^ Glasgow 156
11. ^ Glasgow 243-4
12. ^ Inge 884
13. ^ Time 26 Nov 1923
14. ^ Glasgow 171
15. ^ Inge 884
16. ^ Inge 884, Publishers' Bindings 17 May 2009
17. ^ Inge 884
18. ^ Publishers' Online 17 May 2009
19. ^ Glasgow 129
20. ^ Matthews 33, 36
21. ^ Scura 21
22. ^ Scura 31
23. ^ Glasgow 181
24. ^ Goodman 89
25. ^ Raper 150
26. ^ Goodman 91
27. ^ Wagner 31
28. ^ Raper 237
29. ^ Raper 227
30. ^ Scura 102
31. ^ Raper 228
32. ^ Wagner 37
33. ^ Raper 231
34. ^ Goodman 107
35. ^ Scura 129, Wagner 36
36. ^ Wagner 38
37. ^ Pannill
38. ^ Pannill
39. ^ Wagner 119
40. ^ Bleiler, Everett (1948). The Checklist of Fantastic Literature. Chicago: Shasta Publishers. pp. 127.  
41. ^ Meeker, Richard (1963). The Collected Stories of Ellen Glasgow. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.  

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.

Inge, Tonette Bond. Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, ed. Charles Reagan Wilson and William R. Ferris. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.

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 Press, 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: The Contemporary Reviews. Knoxville: U of Tennessee Press, 1992.

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.

Time Magazine, 26 November 1923.

Wagner, Linda W. Ellen Glasgow: Beyond Convention. Austin U of Texas Press, 1982.

External links

• Works by Ellen Glasgow at Project Gutenberg
• Ellen Glasgow Society
• Photos of the first edition of In This Our Life
• Friends and Rivals: James Branch Cabell and Ellen Glasgow, Online exhibition at Virginia Commonwealth University