Ellen Glasgow

For many years Pulitzer Prize winner Ellen Glasgow has been regarded as a classic American regional novelist. But Glasgow is far more than a Southern writer, as Linda Wagner demonstrates in this fascinating reassessment of her work. A Virginia lady, Glasgow began to write at a time when the highest praise for a literary woman was to be mistaken for a male writer. In her early fiction, published at the turn of the century, all attention is focused on male protagonists; the strong female characters who do appear early in these novels gradually fade into the background. But Ellen Glasgow grew to become a woman who, born to be protected from the very life she wanted to chronicle, moved “beyond convention” to live her life on her own terms. And as her own self-image changed, the perspective of her novels became more feminine, the female characters moved to center stage, and their philosophies became central to her themes. Glasgow’s best novels, then—Barren Ground, Vein of Iron, and the romantic trilogy that includes The Sheltered Life—came late in her life, when she was no longer content to imitate fashionable male novelists. Glasgow’s increased self-assurance as writer and woman led to a far greater awareness of craft. Her style became more highly imaged, more suggestive, as though she wished to widen the range of resources available to move her readers. She became a writer both popular and respected. Her novels appeared as selections of the Literary Guild and the Book-of-the-Month Club, and one became a best seller. At the same time she was chosen as one of the few female members of the Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 1942 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her novel In This Our Life.

Using a variety of critical approaches - including semiotic, intertextual, and biographical - these fifteen essays cover the full range of Glasgow's writings, from well-known novels such as Virginia, Barren Ground, and The Sheltered Life to less familiar works such as The Battle-Ground, The Wheel of Life, the verse collected in The Freeman and Other Poems, and the short stories.

Ellen Glasgow wrote and published nineteen novels as well as poems, short stories, essays, reviews, and an autobiography (published posthumously) in a career that spanned nearly fifty years. Until now, her writings have not been subject to feminist revaluation in the way that works of such writers as Charlotte Perkins Gilman or Willa Cather have been. In Ellen Glasgow and a Woman's Traditions Pamela R. Matthews initiates such a revaluation by taking into account not only Glasgow's gender and her perception of her role as a woman writer but the reader's gender and (mis)understanding of Glasgow. Using current feminist psychological theory, she assesses what Glasgow faced as a woman writer caught between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, examines the traditions in place at these times, and analyzes the influence on Glasgow of her female friendships. This shifting of critical perspective yields entirely new interpretations and closes the gap that has existed between standard criticisms of Glasgow and the effect that Glasgow has had on her readers.

No detailed description available for "Ellen Glasgow's Development as Novelist".

In this book, Ashley Lear examines the relationship between two pioneers of American literature who broke the mold for women writers of their time. Pulitzer Prize–winning novelists Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Ellen Glasgow had divergent careers in different locations, Rawlings in backcountry Florida and Glasgow in urban Virginia, yet their correspondence on life and writing reveals one of the great literary friendships of the South. Rawlings felt such admiration for Glasgow that she spent the last year of her life compiling materials for Glasgow’s biography, a work she never completed. Lear draws on the documents Rawlings collected about Glasgow, Rawlings’s personal notes, and letters between the two writers to describe the experiences that brought them together. Lear shows that Rawlings and Glasgow shared a love of nature and social activism, had complex relationships with their parents and siblings, and prioritized their professional lives over romantic attachments. They were both classified as writers of regional works and juvenilia by critics, and Lear traces their discussions about how to respond to the opinions of book reviewers. Both were also forced to confront a new, quickly modernizing America, which at times clashed with their traditional values and naturalistic lifestyles. This is a fascinating portrait of a friendship that sustained two women writers in a time of social upheaval and changing norms in the American South.

"Ellen Glasgow considered Vein of Iron, published in 1935, to be her best work. "No novel has ever meant quite so much to me," she wrote a friend. The critics agreed; the book was favorably reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review and outsold all but one other work of fiction in the year of its publication." "Opening in the years just before the First World War and laid in the Valley of Virginia, the book traces the experience of a family with four generations of strong women. Faced with a crisis when the bread-winner, a philosopher-minister, is defrocked for his unorthodox views, the women provide the "vein of iron" which carries the family through removal to Richmond (Queensboro in the book), through war and depression until the final return to the mountains."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

For many years Pulitzer Prize winner Ellen Glasgow has been regarded as a classic American regional novelist. But Glasgow is far more than a Southern writer, as Linda Wagner demonstrates in this fascinating reassessment of her work. A Virginia lady, Glasgow began to write at a time when the highest praise for a literary woman was to be mistaken for a male writer. In her early fiction, published at the turn of the century, all attention is focused on male protagonists; the strong female characters who do appear early in these novels gradually fade into the background. But Ellen Glasgow grew to become a woman who, born to be protected from the very life she wanted to chronicle, moved “beyond convention” to live her life on her own terms. And as her own self-image changed, the perspective of her novels became more feminine, the female characters moved to center stage, and their philosophies became central to her themes. Glasgow’s best novels, then—Barren Ground, Vein of Iron, and the romantic trilogy that includes The Sheltered Life—came late in her life, when she was no longer content to imitate fashionable male novelists. Glasgow’s increased self-assurance as writer and woman led to a far greater awareness of craft. Her style became more highly imaged, more suggestive, as though she wished to widen the range of resources available to move her readers. She became a writer both popular and respected. Her novels appeared as selections of the Literary Guild and the Book-of-the-Month Club, and one became a best seller. At the same time she was chosen as one of the few female members of the Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 1942 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her novel In This Our Life.