Glasgow, Ellen (Anderson Gholson)

Glasgow, Ellen [Anderson Gholson] (1874–1945), born in Richmond, Va., of an aristocratic Southern family, in 1897 published her first novel, The Descendant. The Freeman, and Other Poems (1902) is her only volume of verse. The Voice of the People (1900) was the first of a long series of novels recording the social and political background of her state from 1850 to the 1940s, and represented her revolt from the sentimental tradition of Southern fiction in depicting the genteel code of the Old South at bay before the new industrial revolution. This study, concerned with the rise of a farm boy to political prominence, and his death in a mob riot, was followed by such contrasts of life in the old and new social classes of the South as The Battle‐Ground (1902), The Deliverance (1904), The Wheel of Life (1906), The Ancient Law (1908), The Romance of a Plain Man (1909), and The Miller of Old Church (1911). In Virginia (1913) and Life and Gabriella (1916) she wrote novels of Southern women victimized by a decaying code of chivalry. Three realistic studies of political and social conflicts followed: The Builders (1919); One Man in His Time (1922); and Barren Ground (1925). At this time she declared that “what the South needs now is—blood and irony,” and she proceeded to write three satirical novels of manners, The Romantic Comedians (1926), They Stooped to Folly (1929), and The Sheltered Life (1932). In Vein of Iron (1935) she returned to the study of rural life in Virginia. In This Our Life (1941, Pulitzer Prize) is a novel of an aristocratic Virginia family fallen into decadence. The Shadowy Third (1923) collects stories; her Works were collected in 1938. A Certain Measure (1943) collects essays prefatory to her novels. The Woman Within (1954) is her autobiography. Her Letters were collected in 1958; and an edition of her Collected Stories appeared in 1963.