"The only difference between a rut and a grave are the dimensions." -- Ellen Glasgow
Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow (April 22, 1873 - November 21, 1945) was an American novelist. Born in Richmond, Virginia, 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 final novel, In This Our Life, received the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1942. Her autobiography, A Woman Within, appeared posthumously in 1954.
"A tragic irony of life is that we so often achieve success or financial independence after the chief reason for which we sought it has passed away.""All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.""Doesn't all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?""He knows so little and knows it so fluently.""I haven't much opinion of words. They're apt to set fire to a dry tongue, that's what I say.""I waited and worked, and watched the inferior exalted for nearly thirty years; and when recognition came at last, it was too late to alter events, or to make a difference in living.""It is lovely, when I forget all birthdays, including my own, to find that somebody remembers me.""Mediocrity would always win by force of numbers, but it would win only more mediocrity.""No idea is so antiquated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not someday be antiquated.""No life is so hard that you cannot make it easier by the way you take it.""No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.""Nothing in life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the way you take it.""Nothing is more consuming, or more illogical, than the desire for remembrance.""Some women like to sit down with trouble as if it were knitting.""There wouldn't be half as much fun in the world if it weren't for children and men, and there ain't a mite of difference between them under the skins.""To teach one's self is to be forced to learn twice.""Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.""What happens is not as important as how you react to what happens.""Women are one of the Almighty's enigmas to prove to men that He knows more than they do.""Women like to sit down with trouble - as if it were knitting."
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, Francis Thomas Glasgow, was the son of Arthur Glasgow and Catherine Anderson. He was raised in Rockbridge County, Virginia and graduated from Washington and Lee College in 1847. Catherine's brother, Joseph Reid Anderson, graduated fourth in his class of 49, from West Point in 1836. On April 4, 1848, he purchased the Tredegar Ironworks. When news of the secession reached Richmond, Anderson promptly joined the army of Northern Virginia, achieving general's rank, but was soon asked by General Robert E. Lee to return to Tredegar Ironworks to manage the ironworks on which Lee's victory was so dependent.
Ellen's father was later 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 was Anne Jane Gholson. She was born on December 9, 1831 at Needham, Virginia and died on October 27, 1893. She was the daughter of William Yates Gholson & Martha Anne Jane Taylor and the granddaughter of Congressman Thomas Gholson, Jr. and Anne Yates and a descendant of Rev. William Yates, the College of William & Mary's fifth president (1761—1764) and is the namesake for Yates Hall on the College's campus; and William Randolph, a colonist and land owner who played an important role in the history and government of the Commonwealth of Virginia. He and his wife, Mary Isham, are referred to as the "Adam and Eve" of Virginia.
She married Francis T. Glasgow on July 14, 1853. Francis and Anne were the parents of ten children. 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 November 21, 1945. 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.'
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 its 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 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.
Glasgow produced two more "novels of character", 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.
