ELLEN GLASGOW
Ellen Glasgow’s first two books were produced before she was twenty. She
is a Virginian, like Mary Johnston, but a realist--better, a disciple of
naturalism--and concerned with social and personal problems of the last
thirty years. A dozen books stand to her credit, all novels except a
book of verse, nearly all concerned with the social reconstruction in
the South. Banish the connotations of the word “Reconstruction” as used
respecting the South. The period immediately following the end of the
civil war is almost the sole property of Thomas Dixon. Miss Glasgow’s
province for a number of years and a number of books has been the more
gradual and more fateful making over of the South into something
reasonably homogeneous with the rest of the United States than the
leisured feudalism of the ’50s and the hopeless wreck of the ’60s.
She is a novelist of manners, but of changing manners; of cycles and
transformations, whether in the lives of individuals or the life of a
region. Unlike Miss Johnston, she cannot revive the past for its own
sake, but only for the sake of the present and the future. She is an
evolutionist who has not read Darwin and Herbert Spencer in vain. Her
writing is filled with a serious purpose, the purpose to put life
before you not merely as it is but as she thinks you should see it. She
does not preach or moralize, being far too fine an artist for such
crudities. It is enough to have given you the facts in _her
interpretation_ of them. She is quietly confident that you will not be
able to get away from them, so presented. And you hardly ever are!
Miss Glasgow has had to drive so hard and so strongly and so much alone;
she has had to face such a vast inertia of tradition and such a tenacity
of feeling, that the struggle has narrowed her. She hates
sentimentality, and rightly. It has been the terrible obstacle she has
had to confront. Of her South she once said:
“I love it; I was brought up in it, but all my life I’ve had to struggle
against the South’s sentimentality, which I inherit. We shall sooner or
later have to tear asunder that veil of sentimentality. Our people will
have to realize that a statement made in criticism of the South is not
an act of disloyalty. Please say that in as kind a way as possible,”
Miss Glasgow added, probably with some compunction, for, as she said on
another occasion, when asked what the Southerners thought about her: “I
have no idea. They are very kind to me.” To finish her words about the
struggle with inherited sentimentality: “I say it as a Southerner,” she
explained. “We must cultivate within us truth instead of sentimentality,
which up to now has been our darling vice.” These words were uttered in
New York in the fall of 1912, a few months before the publication of her
novel _Virginia_, the title referring, however, not to her State, but
to the heroine of the book, Virginia Pendleton.
You can’t fight sentimentality with tolerance and it is Miss Glasgow’s
handicap that to write the great books she has written, to succeed as
she has succeeded under the most adverse conditions and in the most
adverse environment, she has had to contract her horizon, even to shut
her eyes and thrust with all her might ahead. Surrounded by
sentimentality and the tradition of a past whose glorious perfection it
were treason to question, she has not been able always to see things
clearly and to see them whole. In the early part of 1916 she declared
that contemporary English fiction was superior to American fiction, that
Americans were demanding from writers and politicians alike an “evasive
idealism” and a “sham optimism” and “a sugary philosophy, utterly
without any basis in logic or human experience.” There was some more to
the same effect, but let us not harrow the souls of ourselves who
rejoice in Ellen Glasgow’s work by recalling any more of it. She was
wrong, dead wrong; we think she would be the first to admit it now, but
whether she would or not she is pretty completely to be excused if never
to be defended. She was best answered at the time by Booth Tarkington,
the greatest living American writer of fiction, with the allowable
exception of William Dean Howells. Said Tarkington:
“It is human nature to desire optimism in anybody--in a doctor, or a
friend, or a farm hand, or a dog. Of course, the public desires optimism
in a book, and it wants not the ‘cheapest sort of sham optimism,’ but
the finest sort of genuine optimism that it can understand. Naturally,
the average understanding isn’t the highest understanding; nevertheless,
the writer who stoops to conquer doesn’t conquer.”
Mr. Tarkington went on to say:
“Miss Glasgow is sorry that there are so many writers willing to supply
the demand for ‘sugary philosophy,’ but those writers are not only
willing to supply; they are inspired to supply. They aren’t superior
people turning the trick for money, as Miss Glasgow seems to think; they
are ‘giving the best that is in them.’ They take their art solemnly.”
The truest word on the subject ever uttered and most essential to be
reprinted here. It is not so much for the refutation of Miss Glasgow
that we give it. The full application of Mr. Tarkington’s remarks will
be seen in some of the later chapters of this book.
But to return to our Southern realist.
Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow was born in Richmond, Virginia, April 22,
1874, the daughter of Francis Thomas Glasgow and Anne Jane (Gholson)
Glasgow. Her father belonged to a family of professional men--lawyers,
judges, educators. The child was of delicate health. She never went to
school--an admission she makes with a blush. An aunt used to tell her
Scott’s stories at an age when Mother Goose is the customary
intellectual fare. At thirteen she read and enjoyed Robert Browning. He
is still her favorite poet, though Swinburne has a great place in her
affections. Quite unaccountably Miss Glasgow showed a taste for
scientific subjects. At eighteen she began “a systematic study of
political economy and socialism.” Her love for a story remained strong.
The home was a strict Southern home, the women in it were “sheltered.”
The young woman would shut herself up in her room every day and later
join the family for such diversions as they indulged in. Finally she
went to her father and said:
“Father, I have written a book.”
Isaac F. Marcosson says that Father was dumbfounded, and well he might
have been. The novel was published anonymously and was generally
supposed to be the work of a man of training and experience. It was _The
Descendant_, and it has been characterized as “a rather morbid
exposition of the development and life of an intellectual hybrid, the
offspring of a low woman and a highly intellectual man.”
The first book in which Miss Glasgow established her right to serious
consideration as an American novelist--as a novelist picturing American
life--was _The Voice of the People_, published in 1900. She has referred
in after years to _The Descendant_ as “a mere schoolgirl effort,”
although it was not received as such, not by a long shot! But she could
not so characterize _The Voice of the People_, nor could any one else.
It is a competent picture of the Virginia of the ’80s with its class
distinctions and its political maneuvering, framing a specific and
dramatic story. The novel exhibits a considerable knowledge of political
machinery and a characteristic tale relates how Miss Glasgow got some of
the necessary “atmosphere.” In 1897 she drove over twenty miles in the
hottest August weather in order to sit through two days of a Democratic
State convention. An old family friend, a delegate to the convention,
smuggled Miss Glasgow and her sister on to the stage of the opera house
in which the sessions were held. They were the only women in the
building and the ordeal of listening to two days of Southern oratory
must have been as severe as the ordeal of sitting, obscurely and
uncomfortably, in a sun-baked theater.
It is also said of Miss Glasgow that she remarked one day to a
friend--Mr. Marcosson, if we are not mistaken: “I am going to write a
novel of New York life.”
“But why New York life when you know Virginia and the South so well?”
“For the simple reason that art has no locality. It is universal. I do
not believe that any writer should be confined to any particular
locality.”
A reply which throws light on Miss Glasgow’s earnestness and seriousness
of purpose. But she was, while entirely right in what she said, not
answering the question. Art has no locality, but the artist has
necessarily only a few localities--those he knows tolerably well. Miss
Glasgow’s pictures of New York life never carry the conviction that her
Virginia settings do.
Her own Virginia setting is a very lovely one. Number One West Main
Street, Richmond, is a square old white house, “hemmed in by trees that
cast shade over the soldiers of the Confederacy.” Behind it is a garden
in which walks and composes a beautiful woman with red-gold hair, the
real Titian shade or simply red-brown, as you may decide. It is wavy and
has gold and copper gleams. “Once more you get the touch of Jane
Austen,” explains Mr. Marcosson. He tells us that Miss Glasgow writes
every morning and always behind a locked door; “a door that is not
locked has always given her a hint of possible intrusion. The only
animate thing that has ever shared the comradeship of her work is her
dog, Joy. She writes rapidly and in a large, masculine hand.”
Rapidly, perhaps, but not finally. Nearly every bit of _Virginia_ and
_Life and Gabriella_ was rewritten at least three times, some parts
more; and one chapter was rewritten thirteen times. It sounds
incredible, but Miss Glasgow says so herself. She used to write with a
pen, but now does her first draft in pencil and revises after it has
been typewritten.
And always novels. “I cannot write short stories,” Miss Glasgow
explains. “They bore me excruciatingly. The whole technique of the short
story and the novel is different. All the best of the short stories must
be painfully condensed with slight regard for the evolutionary causes
bringing about this or that effect. Everything that I see, I see in the
form of a novel--as a large canvas. I want to trace the process of cause
and effect; and that is why both _Virginia_ and _Gabriella_ were a joy
in the writing. Those books do not deal with problems. I do not ever let
a problem get into my novels--there is none, except, of course, as some
problem of an individual life may present itself to the character. I am
not concerned with any propaganda. A book should never serve any purpose
but the telling of life as it is--being faithfully realistic.”
“And realism is only the truth of life told, and is the writer’s true
business. Hawthorne was strongly realistic. He did not try to be
pleasing or pleasant. He wrote things as he saw them.
“I must live with a character a long time. Then the desire to write
comes and I begin after that to shape the background, and the details of
plot weave into their proper places. I never force myself to begin a
piece of work nor force myself to keep at it, when the something within
stops. And I never get an idea by looking for one. They just come,
always unexpectedly and always at the most inopportune times and
places--at a reception, on the train, on the street.”
When Miss Glasgow says that she does not let a problem get into her
novels, she means that she does not put it there, or consciously put it
there. She selects her people, who have _their_ individual problems as
she concedes, and brings them into relation with each other and from
that relation a problem may arise, probably does. But that is a natural
and artistic procedure, the perfect antithesis of the propagandist’s
methods. Once to Montrose J. Moses Miss Glasgow talked rather freely
about novel writing and her literary ideals.
“There are three things a novelist has to do to prove himself,” she
declared. “First, he must show an ability to create personalities;
second, he must exhibit a sincerity of style; and third, he must evince
the capacity for an intelligent criticism of life. Without these he is
not worth very much in a serious, big way. To contribute to the
knowledge and understanding of life--that should be his motive in
writing, not primarily to create a pleasant impression.
“There have been several stages in our growth since the special type of
fiction was evolved. There was the sentimentality of Richardson; then
came my favorite, Fielding, our first realist; and finally arrived the
critical period with its early representative in Jane Austen and more
recent upholder in Meredith. We had to pass through stages far from real
life before we reached the time of direct dealing with life, of real
criticism of life. Take such men as Wells and Galsworthy--and maybe
Arnold Bennett;--are they not trying to see life through and through? I
do not believe in the realism that merely depicts for the picture.
Realism of the kind I mean not only depicts, but interprets as well.”
“How about Fielding, your favorite?” asked Mr. Moses.
“Oh, he had his faults, but they were honest ones.” Mr. Moses remarked
Miss Glasgow’s enthusiasm as she talked. “He was the first to teach us
that life--and ordinary life, too--has poetry in it. There are some of
our writers with a social conscience who use narrative as a mere vehicle
for philosophy. It is always well to have a big central idea to hold the
building together, but realism--though some novelists would separate
it--cannot be practiced apart from vision. The novelist must have a
perspective in life.
“When I first began writing I steeped myself in economics, in
sociology--and later in German mysticism. But one learns only that he
may unlearn, if necessary. In doing _Virginia_ I was obliged to revisit
certain localities to refresh my memory of things. But I could not
write of them immediately; the impressions had to filter through my
imagination.
“A man who writes for his age seldom writes for any other. And that is
why I do not believe in being consciously local. Mr. Howells, as our
greatest realist, made us see the poetry of the life he knew best. While
I’ve never consciously been influenced by any school, I have felt what
he has done for the novel. At one time I knew my Balzac, my Flaubert, my
Guy de Maupassant, by heart. And of course I read the Russians, who, I
think, are the greatest of all novelists. But as far as I am aware, I
have worked my own method out for myself.”
Because she believes so much in the novel form, Miss Glasgow has never
written a play nor ever consented to the dramatization of any of her
books. “I like the flow of the novel,” she says. “It is the best
expression of the people and the times. The drama cannot comprehend all
of life as it is to-day. A larger canvas is needed to picture the
greater complexity. The greatest drama was written in times when life
was far more simple than it is now. The novel alone can take in its flow
all of this complexity.”
Add to Miss Glasgow’s literary tastes Maeterlinck, Spinoza, Ruskin and
the Bible. She was for years “tremendously interested” (Mr. Marcosson’s
words) in the literature of the Orient. There is a little brass Buddha
on her desk in the house in Richmond. The fatalistic touch, or more
accurately, the sense of the law of recompense and the payments life is
always exacting, pervades her stories. Certain ideas are for her garbed
in definite phrases. Take, for example, the titles of two of her books,
_The Wheel of Life_ (1906) and _The Ancient Law_ (1908). They merely
repeat the titles of the final chapter and the final book, respectively,
in her earlier novel, _The Deliverance_.
For some years Miss Glasgow has divided her time between her Richmond
home and a pleasant New York apartment overlooking Central Park, an
apartment which somehow, with its books, its portrait of Miss Glasgow
empaneled, its white pillars at the entrance to the reception room, its
books, books, books in mahogany cases, preserves a good deal of the
atmosphere of a Southern home. Miss Glasgow comes to New York “for the
change,” and also to get the life of New York which has alternated with
the life of Virginia in her later books.
_Virginia_, as her most popular book and the cause of a considerable
controversy on its appearance in 1913, must receive some attention in
this sketch. It is the first book of a trilogy--provided Miss Glasgow
writes the third! _Life and Gabriella_ was the second book of the
uncompleted trilogy. Let us see what Miss Glasgow has had to say about
these books. We assume that the reader knows her to have been an ardent
suffragist and advocate of economic independence for her sex.
“Success for a woman” (Miss Glasgow is speaking) “must be about the same
as for a man. Success for a woman means a harmonious adjustment to life.
Material success is not success if it does not also bring happiness.
“The great thing in life is the development of character to a point
where one may mold his destiny. One must use the circumstances of life
rather than be used by them. The greatest success for a woman is to be
the captain of her own soul.
“Women have always been in revolt.” (This in answer to a question as to
whether _Life and Gabriella_ was intended to express the modern revolt
of women.) “It is only now that the revolt is strong enough to break
through the crust. No matter what her condition or class, woman does not
now have to marry for support, because she is ashamed to be unmarried,
or because she is hounded to it by her relatives. She dare remain
single.
“I believe that marriage should be made more difficult and divorce
easier. I also believe that divorce laws should be made more uniform.
Laws made for traffic and commercial ends may need to be changed when a
certain arbitrary boundary is passed, but laws made for human nature
should be everywhere the same, for the man who lives in California and
the one in Maine are--just men.
“The mistake women, wives, have always made is that they have
concentrated too intensely on emotion. They have made emotion the only
thing in the world. Husband and wife must be mentally companionable if
their happiness is to last through the years.
“I find one of the most fascinating dramas in all the facets of life to
be the great epic of changing conditions and the adjustment of
individuals to the new order. Naturally the battle is always sharpest
and most dramatic in those places where the older system has been most
firmly intrenched. And that is why the coming of the new order in the
South has been attended by so many dramatic stories. When I began
_Virginia_ I had in mind three books dealing with the adjustment of
human lives to changing conditions.
“In _Virginia_ I wanted to do the biography of a woman, representative
of the old system of chivalry and showing her relation to that system
and the changing order. Virginia’s education, like that of every
well-bred Southern woman of her day, was designed to paralyze her
reasoning faculties and to eliminate all danger of mental unsettling.
Virginia was the passive and helpless victim of the ideal of feminine
self-sacrifice. The circumstances of her life first molded and then
dominated her.
“Gabriella was the product of the same school, but instead of being used
by circumstances, she used them to create her own destiny. The two books
are exact converses. Where Virginia is passive, Gabriella is active.
“Virginia desired happiness, but did not expect it, much less fight for
it, and consequently in a system where self-sacrifice was the ideal of
womanhood she became submerged by circumstances just as have been so
many other women of her type. Gabriella, on the other hand, desired
happiness and insisted on happiness. Gabriella had the courage of action
and through molding circumstances wrested from life her happiness and
success.”
“And the third book?” The reader must not think from the condensed and
coalesced extracts of what Miss Glasgow has said about her work that she
talks readily. She does not. You have, sometimes, rather to drag it out
of her--that is, what you want concerning her own work. On literature
generally she talks with freedom, wisdom and point.
“The third book may never be written,” Miss Glasgow answered. “If it
should be, it will deal with a woman who faces her world with the
weapons of indirect influence or subtlety.”
Gabriella’s philosophy was summed up in her words: “I want to be happy.
I have a right to be happy, and it depends on myself. No life is so hard
that you can’t make it easier by the way you take it.” In the face of
disaster which would have broken the hearts of many women, she won her
success, her happiness, from the cruelties of life.
“I believe,” Miss Glasgow once said, “that a person gets out of life
just what he puts into it--or rather he puts in more than he gets out, I
suppose; for he is always working for something unattainable; always
groping vaguely with his spirit to find the hidden things. Gabriella, as
you may remember, was ‘obliged to believe in something or die.’”
We have heard Miss Glasgow tell how she lives with a character. She is,
or was, living with the character which will become the central figure
in the third novel of her probable trilogy. “The time is not ripe to
write,” she said, when last speaking about this possible book. “As soon
as I begin to speak of the character it all leaves me. For some years I
wrote one book every two years. Three years elapsed between _Virginia_
and _Life and Gabriella_. I have no idea when the next will be finished.
I cannot understand how any one can finish and publish two books a year
regularly. It seems that one ought to give more of one’s self to a book
than that. For my own part, I should like to write each novel and keep
it ten years before I publish it. But my friends tell me, ‘Of course,
that is impossible. You change so much in ten years--all would be
different. You would be obliged to write it all over again.’ I suppose
that is true.”
Very true. But the dissatisfaction with the ten-year-old novel would be
the dissatisfaction of the conscientious artist, Ellen Glasgow. It would
not be the dissatisfaction of the novel reader. At least, re-reading
_The Deliverance_ these fourteen years after its first publication, your
admiration for Miss Glasgow’s finished art, her sense of drama, her
penetration of the human heart, her portraitive skill, her fine sense of
the retributive conscience implanted in the human breast--all these
blended perceptions and satisfactions are as lively as they were when
the book first came out. Really the only difference is that now you look
confidently for them and are, though no less rejoiced and grateful, not
in the least surprised at the finding.
Miss Glasgow’s peculiar brilliance has never received a more honest or
better tribute than in what Gene Stratton-Porter had to say after
reading _Virginia_. It is worth quoting in full:
“The writings of Miss Ellen Glasgow have always possessed a unique and
special charm for me that has carried me from one book to another for
the pleasure derived from reading, with no special effort on my part to
learn just why I enjoyed them. Last summer a man quoted in my presence a
line of Miss Glasgow’s, something like this: ‘Not being able to give
her the finer gift of the spirit, he loaded her with jewels.’
“My dictionary defines an epigram, ‘A bright or witty thought tersely
and sharply expressed, often ending satirically.’ A saying like this
almost reaches that level. At any rate, it stuck in my mind, and when a
friend recently sent me a copy of Miss Glasgow’s latest book, I began
reading it with the thought in mind that I would watch and see if she
could say other things of like quality. My patience! She rolls them
unendingly. Before I had read twenty pages I realized just where lay the
charm that had always held me. It was not in plot, nor in character
drawing, not in construction; it was in the woman expressing her own
individuality with her pen. What a gift of expression she has! I know of
no other woman and very few men who can equal her on this one point.
“Chesterton does the same thing, with a champagne sparkle and bubble,
but I would hesitate to say that even he surpasses her, for while he is
bubbling and sparkling on the surface, charming, alluring, holding one,
she is down among the fibers of the heart, her bright brain and keen wit
cutting right and left with the precision of a skilled surgeon. Not so
witty, but fully as wise.
“You have only to read _Virginia_ to convince yourself.
“‘Having married, they immediately proceeded, as if by mutual consent,
to make the worst of it.’
“‘Having lived through the brief illumination of romance, she had come
at last into that steady glow which encompasses the commonplace.’
“‘To demand that a pretty woman should possess the mental responsibility
of a human being would have seemed an affront to his inherited ideas of
gallantry.’
“‘If the texture of his soul was not finely wrought, the proportions of
it were heroic.’
“‘From the day of his marriage he had never been able to deny her
anything she had set her heart upon--not even the privilege of working
herself to death for his sake when the opportunity offered.’
“‘You know how Abby is about men.’ ‘Yes, I know, and it’s just the way
men are about Abby.’
“‘How on earth could she go out sewing by the day if she didn’t have her
religious convictions?’
“‘Anybody who has mixed with beggars oughtn’t to turn up his nose at a
respectable bank.’ ‘But he says that it’s because the bank is so
respectable that he doesn’t think he could stand it.’
“‘She was as respectable as the early ’80s and the 21,000 inhabitants of
Dinwiddie permitted a woman to be.’
“These lines are offered as a taste of her quality, and they roll from
her pen in every paragraph.”
In accordance with the general method of this book we have thought it
best to put Ellen Glasgow, certainly a genius, certainly one of the
greatest living American novelists, perhaps one of the greatest since
there has been an American literature--we have thought it best to put
her, we say, before the reader chiefly in her own words and in her
aspect to others, just as she would herself let a character in one of
her books reveal himself by his speeches and his actions and stand
before you as the other characters sized him up. She would not tell you
what sort of man he was and require you to swallow her account of him;
she would set him before you, talking and going about; she would give
you the impression he made on those about him, and let you judge him for
yourself--the only right way. We have only one thing more which we want
to point out at the close, Miss Glasgow’s insight into the mind and
conscience of her people. It is best illustrated, and we give the close
of a chapter in _The Deliverance_--after all, is not this wonderful
story the finest of Miss Glasgow’s novels, we wonder? Christopher Blake,
the illiterate heir of a great name, the cherisher of an undying hate,
has succeeded in ruining or hastening the ruin of Will Fletcher,
grandson of the man who stole the Blake plantation. It is Blake’s
revenge. He can reach old Fletcher through the boy and he has done it.
He, a Blake, living in a wretched shack, while the erstwhile negro
overseer dwells at Blake Hall!
“Before him were his knotted and blistered hands, his long limbs
outstretched in their coarse clothes, but in the vision beyond the
little spring he walked proudly with his rightful heritage upon him--a
Blake by force of blood and circumstance. The world lay before
him--bright, alluring, a thing of enchanting promise, and it was as if
he looked for the first time upon the possibilities contained in this
life upon the earth. For an instant the glow lasted--the beauty dwelt
upon the vision, and he beheld, clear and radiant, the happiness which
might have been his own; then it grew dark again, and he faced the
brutal truth in all its nakedness: he knew himself for what he was--a
man debased by ignorance and passion to the level of the beasts. He had
sold his birthright for a requital, which had sickened him even in the
moment of fulfillment.
“To do him justice, now that the time had come for an acknowledgment, he
felt no temptation to evade the judgment of his own mind, nor to cheat
himself with the belief that the boy was marked for ruin before he saw
him--that Will had worked out, in vicious weakness, his own end. It was
not the weakness, after all, that he had played upon--it was rather the
excitable passion and the whimpering fears of the hereditary drunkard.
He remembered now the long days that he had given to his revenge, the
nights when he had tossed sleepless while he planned a widening of the
breach with Fletcher. That, at least, was his work, and his alone--the
bitter hatred, more cruel than death, with which the two now stood apart
and snarled. It was a human life that he had taken in his hand--he saw
that now in his first moment of awakening--a life that he had destroyed
as deliberately as if he had struck it dead before him. Day by day, step
by step, silent, unswerving, devilish, he had kept about his purpose,
and now at the last he had only to sit still and watch his triumph.
“With a sob, he bowed his head in his clasped hands, and so shut out the
light.”
Powerful? Yes, the passage shows an unlimited mastery of the novelist’s
real material, the human soul. _The Deliverance_ is a story of revenge
with few equals and, that we can recall, no superiors; but it goes far
beyond that, because it shows also the retributive and regenerative
forces at work in Christopher Blake and their final effect upon him. The
hour in which he surrenders himself to justice as Fletcher’s murderer,
while the dead man’s grandchild flees, is the outward and visible sign
of an inward and spiritual reformation, a reformation to come but to be
preceded by an atonement. Wonderful among heroines is Maria Fletcher;
wonderful, infinitely pathetic, matchlessly moving, is the blind
grandmother sitting stiff and straight in her Elizabethan chair,
directing the hundreds of slaves who are slaves no longer, discoursing
upon the duties of the children who inherit a splendid name, recalling
with tenderness and spirit and racial pride the great people of her
youth, giving orders that are never executed, eating her bit of chicken
and sipping her port, blind--blind--successfully deceived, successfully
kept alive and contented and in a sort of way happy these twenty years
since the slave Phyllis “‘got some ridiculous idea about freedom in her
head, and ran away with the Yankee soldiers before we whipped them.’”
A magnificent portrait, by an artist of whom America can never be
anything but proud.
BOOKS BY ELLEN GLASGOW
_The Descendant_, 1897.
_Phases of an Inferior Planet_, 1898.
_The Voice of the People_, 1900.
_The Freeman and Other Poems_, 1902.
_The Battleground_, 1902.
_The Deliverance_, 1904.
_The Wheel of Life_, 1906.
_The Ancient Law_, 1908.
_The Romance of a Plain Man_, 1909.
_The Miller of Old Church_, 1911.
_Virginia_, 1913.
_Life and Gabriella_, 1916.
_The Builders_, 1919.
_One Man in His Time_, 1922.
_Miss Glasgow’s first two books were brought out by Harper & Brothers,
New York; all the rest are published by Doubleday, Page & Company, New
York._