Glasgow, Ellen. (1874 - 1945).
L i f e
- born in an aristocratic Southern family in Virginia > her own experience of the rural agricultural life
- anticipated the growth of the Southern Renaissance
W o r k
(a) the South and its changes
(b) the struggle for survival
(c) the women aware of the necessity of a detached stoicism despite the pain they have to bear
(d) a recurrent motif of female protagonists’ unfulfilled emotional lives
=> her literary development = the cultural development of the South in a condensed form: sentimentalism about the old lost values >> critical realism, irony, and satire on the nostalgia for the slave-holding plantation life
The Voice of the People (1900):
- an early novel about a family plantation life and a woman’s emotional unfulfilment
The Battle Ground (1902):
- a novel still in a romantic vein about a suffering of the Civil War non-combatants rather than that of the soldiers in the battle
The Deliverance (1904):
- a mature novel about the struggle for the political power between the once slave-holding aristocracy x the newly rich after the Civil War
One Man in His Time (1922):
- a masterpiece about a politician of modest means making his way to the office of the governor of the state only to be shot by his opponents
Barren Ground (1925):
- a masterpiece about a woman struggling for the further existence of her farm
The Romantic Comedians (1926), They Stooped to Folly (1929), and The Sheltered Life (1932):
- novels of a narrower scope exposing the folly of the Southern sentimentalists refusing to accept their inevitable defeat and the change of social order
Vein of Iron (1935) and In This Our Life (1941):
- family chronicles; the latter won her the Pulitzer prize
The Woman Within (1954, posthum.):
- her autobiography
(Photo: Knowledge Rush com).
AuthorEllen (Anderson Gholson) Glasgow. (1874 - 1945). American.
WorkNovelist. Author of Barren Ground (1925).
GenresModern fiction. Women writing. Regionalism. Romance.
Bercovitch, Sacvan, ed. The Cambridge History of American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
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Ruland, Richard, Malcolm Bradbury. Od puritanismu k postmodernismu. Praha: Mladá fronta, 1997.
Vančura, Zdeněk, ed. Slovník spisovatelů: Spojené státy americké. Praha: Odeon, 1979.
"Women like to sit down with trouble as if it were knitting".
From The Sheltered Life (1932).