LELLEN GLASGOW} SOCIAL CRITIC BY Martha Marie Briney AN ABSTRACT Submitted to the School for Advanced Graduate Studies of 'Michigan State University of Agriculture and Applied Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of English 1956 Approved W 6 m, ‘vv‘ d~:—‘ol 'no‘. .- | “-¢ 5‘ ‘ v .n_ v ‘ 4 Q ~ .‘ -vfi.‘ _. . l Iu‘ ‘ . .«_ 1 ‘n - ." h_. - u. . u. ‘A ‘o .a .V. ‘ l ‘l ‘ a \. .I t .. .‘ I .,. s t t' 't It '0 C '0 ‘ c n." . i \' u ‘ t «7". ‘.VI‘. " \ c.‘ ‘1 . .0. ‘— '1 “ - I '- ‘ 1 . - ‘- I n \ \. o < ‘ ‘ ‘. c,- . I u. .‘ . _. o 1 ‘l M ‘n I I.‘ l I. \ ,* n I \ n ’0 \. s 'n . II .u . s . ‘ . 'lhe purpose of this study is to discover the extent and significance of the social consciousness which Ellen Glasgow revealed in her novels, specifically to investigate her atti— tude toward the poor-white, the negro, the artist and the in- tellectual, formalized religion, the status of the Southern gentlewoman, and the New South. The method is implicit in the problem. The writer exam- ined the novels in chronological order and collected observa- tions on the topics cited. Wherever feasible, she has pre- sented the evidence in the language of the novels. It has also been correlated with what Miss Glasgow had to say on these topics in her autobiography and in her articles of so- cial and literary criticism. Ellen Glasgow dealt honestly and sympathetically with the poor-white; however, because in her full length portraits she depicted exceptional members of the group rather than typ- ical ones, the resulting picture, while valid, is only partial. Its truth, therefore, is limited and its final importance "initiatory rather than intrinsic." Her earliest portrayals of the negro fall largely within the plantation tradition, but when one reads her novels chron- ologically, one notes that although her concern with the negro is a minor one, her portrayal of him is fair, and her presenta- tion of the racial problem is marked by honesty and increasing realism. Ellen Glasgow regarded traditional Christianity as an out- worn code. To her veneration for the Episcopal Church had g 4 I... o- ' hue.- 0—" goou.-o-o . - air—”0". ..'"o.. ‘h.._: . O n l O.‘ O o. ‘ i,‘ ...‘.‘ '1 v "c t... ‘- a...' \ ‘\ ‘ ‘:.I4 -- o ‘. v crystallized into the worship of customs, and the blood sym- bolism emphasized in Calvinism was repellent. Despite this, her novels show increasingly a recognition of man's need for a religion that will satisfy and grudging respect for Calvin- ism. Ellen Glasgow presents the Southern gentlewoman as a victim of male chivalry, of the Pauline dicta, and of woman's own acquiescence. She was not a militant feminist, but she was continuously concerned with the problem of self-realiza- tion for women, a problem, however, which she nowhere solved. In her handling of the artist and the intellectual in a hostile society, Miss Glasgow showed increasing realism and understanding. She moved from a romantic or satiric treat- ment to one which was marked by realism. A certain detach- ment which had marked her earliest treatments yielded, final- ly, to an impassioned protest against the anti-intellectualism of the South and of America. While Miss Glasgow's endorsement of the New South was never uncritical, it was increasingly qualified. She approved of the infusion of new blood, but decried mistaking change for Progress, the political isolation of the South, drowning the spiritual in the material, creating a culture without beauty, and failing to treasure a priceless heritage. Ellen Glasgow's achievement falls within two spheres, the social and the ethical. She showed a high degree of re- sponsible social consciousness, and, in this respect was a .t O':C“ '- ..¢ ,. . ‘OU' §\.-~. . I I '4‘ ::..: f pioneer; and she worked out a way of life which, although not religious, met the needs of an essentially religious na- ture that could find no satisfaction in traditional religion. Ellen Glasgow ended life as she had begun it--in intel- lectual revolt. ELLEN GLASGOW: SOCIAL CRITIC By Martha Marie Briney A Thesis Submitted to the School for Advanced Graduate Studies of Michigan State University of Agriculture and Applied Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of English 1956 ‘ O . ' .i.. "" 'u-u... Vt. -- «.2: i . . . _ a; s .;1-‘ ‘ o .. C I "ul . ‘-.. 4 ”\o‘ ‘\.. :o‘ .' ‘v‘ I'. w.- I .. .g‘u I '; ‘Gb . U. “ P-.. 1 “I I .' ‘1 I ‘ W \:‘ '.‘ . . a- . . ~. . u ‘o -.o o 3' o o . “Q .‘a up. n- _ ‘ ._' ..‘ ’t .‘w‘ "a-: I b ‘. \b“:< \ “ Is' . ‘J x: . 3". '- ‘O. . O .‘ P ,. ..\ '\ \- O ‘I ‘0‘ \. . o 6 .. o‘o ‘t o ‘. a‘. .A .4 ‘ .'._ o. s '. 9 ‘\.’ s Q ‘ . . 5., ‘ ‘Q ‘\ O .‘I ,. I. C. ' o I.‘ ‘. , "'. V,‘ .- . , ‘ ‘3 . ‘ Q‘ .“ . 2‘. ‘ o I ACKNOW LEDGMEN TS The. author welcomes this opportunity to thank Dr. Russel B. Nye for his understanding and sympathetic guidance through- out the writing of this thesis. She is also deeply apprecia- tive of the encouragement and helpful suggestions of Dr. Claude Newlin. To Dean Marguerite Roberts of Westhampton College, Uni- versity of Richmond, whose enthusiasm for Ellen Glasgow proved contagious and who suggested the kernel from which this study grew, the writer acknowledges with pleasure her indebtedness. The writer also gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance provided by scholarships granted by Michigan State University and Hood College in 1952-1953, which made possible, in part, her program of study. To Miss Katharine E. Dutrow, librarian, and to Mrs. Frances R. Brandenburg, reference librarian, of the Joseph Henry Apple Library, Hood College, the writer expresses her appreciation for prompt assistance in securing materials necessary to this investigation. She is also indebted for assistance to Mr. Jack Dalton, librarian, to Mr. Francis L. Berkeley, Jr., curator of manu- l scripts, and to Mr. Russell M. Smith, assistant in manuscripts, of the Alderman Library, the University of Virginia. 11 0- o .0' t. v...‘ ’\ . . ‘ O '. I. o .“ . d u D s. . t 0“. ~- I u.' o 0 ‘ n u ‘ o, h"“-: . .0 n. . o v.‘ -‘4 .l I- . o v I. . ‘.‘ .,‘~ s._‘ ‘ C. I .. ‘I .4 \ . s: o - ‘a‘.. ’i Q \ h \ “s. o . oJ .- o t .. h \ ~ I a. I. .. h a . .~ . n ‘v \‘ \ ‘\ in. ‘x , . l \. a ‘Q. \ . \ \e l TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER I. II. III. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX. Born to Rebellion Seeking an Outlet The Poor-White Finds a Spokesman The South's Peculiar Problem Sounding Brass or a Tinkling Cymbal "The Tragedy of Everywoman, as It Was Lately Enacted in the Southern States of America" Artist and Intellectual in Exile Critic of the New South The Unreconciled Heart APPENDIX I. II. Summary of Critical Estimates of the Novels Summary of Critical Opinions of the Nevels in Relation to Realism BIBLIOGRAPHY 111 PAGE an I 96 164 216 27L: 397 nus 519 546 564 578 CHAPTER I BORN TO REBELLION I cannot recall the time when the pattern of society, as well as the scheme of things in general, had not seemed to me false and even malignant. «Ellen Glasgow, 1h; Woman Within Ellen Glasgow,l who was to write of her native Virginia, with both tenderness and detachment, was born either on April 21 or on April 22, either in the year 1873 or in the year 18714,2 in the capital city of Richmond, once described as "a town where God fails to fulfill himself in many ways."3 The confusion over the exact day in April of'her birth reflects, as interpreted by Miss Glasgow herself, a conflict which was to be of profound significance in her development as a per- son. The place of her birth was to be of profound signifi- cance in her development as a writer, for as she recorded in her autobiography, she "had been born with an intimate feeling lEllen Glasgow's full name is Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow, Anderson being a family name on her father's side and Gholson being her mother's maiden name. 2Ellen Glasgow, The Woman Within (New York, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 195-47. PP. 5-5. Ifile Woman Within, Miss Glasgow's spiritual autobiography, hereinafter referred to as the autobiography in contradistinction from A Certain Measure, her literary autobiography, will in future refe - ences 5e identified in the text by the symbol _W_W. 3Howard Mumford Jones "Product of the Tragic Muse," §§_L, XXIII (March 29, 19:15, 51. 1 s V. 'uc s o -...‘. l u- t :- mm, . I... '00 ‘3 " .' ‘0. ~.. ‘ .5 ' ‘ Oq . UH ..‘ ~ .- i‘ 'v - Ah \v. , \ N, “ :‘ \‘3 ' I ~.- Io ‘ I. 5';- is -‘ '9' ..| 't l “ I: .l .0 .‘..I t ~ I \ ‘. \ . \ for the spirit of the past, and the lingering poetry of time and place" (WW, p. 76). Ellen, the eighth of ten children born to Francis Thomas Glasgow and Anne Jane Gholson Glasgow, was one of four born in an old house with a big garden located on Cary Street at the corner of First, a street of which Ellen Glasgow herself wrote, that if it lacked a future, or even a present, it still Jealously preserved a distinguished past (WW, p. 22). The older children had all been born in the country, but necessity and Francis Glasgow's position as superintendent and one of the managing directors of the Tredegar Iron Works, which had supplied "a large part of the munitions and ordnance used by the Confederate Government" (WW, p. 301), brought the family to Richmond. In the veins of Ellen Glasgow flowed some of the bluest and some of the sturdiest blood of Virginia. Her father "was of Valley stock, and Scottish in every nerve and sinew" (WW, p. 298); her mother was "a perfect flower of the Tidewater" (WE, p. 298). She was "the descendant of Yates, Gholsons, and James-River Harrisons and Randolphs."ll Miss Glasgow wrote that "it is possible that from.that union of opposites, I derived a perpetual conflict of types. Even in childhood, my soul was a battleground for hostile forces of character, for obscure mental and emotional antagonisms" (WW, p. 16). “Do las Southall Freeman, "Ellen Glasgow: Idealist," slag, x11 August 31, 1935). ll. DITIH)‘ 7: \u I Her attitude toward her father is summarized in her ironic recollection that "he never committed a pleasure. For pleas- ures were not only unnecessary to the scheme of salvation, they were also extravagant" (WW, p. 15). "A man of fine presence, with an upright carriage," he is described by his daughter as "stalwart, unbending, rock-ribbed with Calvinism, yet richly endowed with the irrepressible Scottish sense of humor" and as regarding "every earthly affliction, from an invading army to the curdling of a pan of milk, as divinely appointed by a God, who must have been the first dangerous Experimentalist" (WW, p. 16). Her mother, she declared, was the center of her child- hood's world, the sun in her universe. She wrote: She made everything luminous--the sky, the street, the trees, the house, the nursery. Her spirit was the loveliest I have ever known, and her life was the saddest. I have two images of her, one a crea- ture of light and the other a figure of tragedy. One minute I remember her smiling, happy, Joyous, making gaiety where there was no gaiety. The next minute I see her ill, worn, despairing, yet still with her rare flashes of brilliance. I am as old now as she was when she died; yet my heart breaks again whenever I remember her life. A tragic shape dims her light. Then it passes as the drift of cloud over a star, and she shines there in soli- tary3§adiance, unalterably fixed in my memory (WW, p. l . And just as Anne Jane Gholson's social background differed from her husband's so did her religious background, for "she had been brought up in the Episcopal Church and had a long line of high-church Episcopalian clergy and scholarly free- thinkers in her ancestry" (WW, p. 59). *stR'b, ‘ (1‘13"; ‘:' 7'3“ 75:1 .0' “as” 0.." Q WM u; r. “Ina“ '01-, s ' s " ' too-o.“ II‘ 1...... .m m. I O. ”‘h .0 ... ~ 'L'h I‘d. O :“u . In. :7 ‘..-‘ ' v .., o,_“. a . . ..‘.~:' as! ‘;l Its. '9. ‘. .. ‘l ‘..‘.. ..;l 'v .. u. ... a ‘0 H‘.’ ‘WI . '4‘ . ‘ .‘o. .a‘ -.‘ .c.. .11 -- v s' u‘ x" I: 1 ‘I ."~( \ . ' GI . . O. ‘. l‘ . ‘~\.:.‘ "- I“ .. '. That Ellen Glasgow regarded her parents' marriage as an uncongenial one, she made very clear. She noted, "My father had little compassion for the inarticulate, and as his Calvin- istic faith taught him, for the soulless; and because of this and for many other reasons, including this iron vein of Pres- byterianism, he was one of the last men on earth that she [my mother] should have married. Though he admired her, he never in his life, not for so much as a single minute, understood her. Even her beauty, since he was without a sense of beauty, eluded him" (11!. pp. 114-15). Everywhere throughout her auto- tuography it is clear that Miss Glasgow's sympathies were with her mether and withheld from her father. If her mother was the "sun in her universe," her father was the cloud that dimmed that universe with his presence. He was central to almost all of the unhappy events within the family which Miss Glasgow remembered in her childhood. Even the nervous disorder which cwertook Mrs. Glasgow in about Ellen's tenth year and changed her " from a source of radiant happiness into a chronic invalid, ‘kmose nervous equilibrium was permanently damaged," Ellen Glas- gow by implication seemed to attribute to her father (WW, ‘1» 61). In Miss Glasgow's own analysis, this tragic occur- rence, which plunged her childhood into grief and anxiety, 1profound1y affected, not only her mind and character, but her whole future life (WW, p. 61). Ellen Glasgow was a frail and sensitive child, who, lack- ing the physical vigor of the usual child of her age, led, dur- ing the winter months in the city at least, a much less robust .21 life than the average child. During those early years she spent much time in the company of her>mammy, Lizzie Jones, wandering over the old streets and through the cemeteries of Richmond. But her happiest days were spent at the family farm, Jerdone Castle, where, in company with her youngest sisters and brother, she developed the deep and observant appreciation of nature which is reflected in almost all of her novels. This phase of her life, the phase that in retro- spect she was to regard as the only truly happy period, ended when her father sold Jerdone Castle and when her mammy left the Glasgows to live with their very close friends, the Pat- tersons, at Reveille, a few miles away. From these early years in city and country several expe- riences remained deeply impressed upon her mind. Her earliest recollection (she does not think she could have been more than a.year or two old) was of awakening in the house on Cary Street and screaming with terror because she saw "a face without a body hanging there in the sunset, beyond the tOp windowpanes. - . . a bodiless apparition, distorted, unreal, yet more real to . . . [her] than either . . . [herself] or the world" (WW, EL 4). In her autobiography she described this experience: Mbving forward and backward [rocked in her mother's arms, as she learned afterward], as contented and as mindless as an.amoeba, submerged in that vast fog of existence, I open my eyes and look up at the top windowpanes. Beyond the windowpanes, in the midst of a red glow, I see a face without a body staring in at me, a vacant face, round, pallid, grotesque, malev- olent. Terror--or was it merely sensation?--stabbed me into consciousness. Terror of the sinking sun? Or terror of the formless, the unknown, the mystery, terror of life, of the world, of nothing or every- thing? Convulsions seized me, a spasm of dumb agony. One minute, I was not; the next minute, I was. I felt. I was separate. I could be hurt. I had dis- covered myself. And I had discovered, too, the uni- verse apart from myself (WW, pp. 3-u). Vivid though this impression was it did not trouble her dur- ing the happy years of her early childhood. "Not until I was eight or nine years old," she wrote, "was I driven to unchild- like brooding over my sense of exile in a hostile world, and back again to that half-forgotten presence of the evil face without a body" (1!, p. 25). Two other experiences which occurred during her early years on Cary Street reveal her earliest recognition of a notif that was to play an important role in more than one, but in especially one, of her novels, the motif of the hunted amd the hunter, which conditioned General David Archbsld.ih. .ghg Sheltered Li§g_in much the same way that it did Ellen Glasgow in real life. She described the first experience in these words : I was too old to be trundled far; but after many illnesses, my carriage, with its quaint phaeton top, was sometimes used for a rest or a nap out-of-doors. I remember this scene, not for itself, but because it was arrested and held fast by a blow, by a thrust of emotion. Grave, attentive, absorbed, I played on, alone, heaping the small green buds into mounds and borders for a doll's garden. Then, in the midst of my earnest play, I hear a scream.of pain, a sound of stones flung and falling, the heavy tread of feet run- ning. ,Down the middle of the street, coming toward me through the sun and dust, a large black dog flees in terror. The dog passes me; he hesitates. He turns his head and looks at me, and he flees on. The men and the boys shout. I run out into the street. My manmy and the strange nurse rush after me. Mammy f 619d 1"! reaches me first. She swoops down and gathers me up into her*arms. But I have seen what it means to be hunted. I run on with the black dog. I am chased into an area over the street. I am beaten with clubs, and caught in a net. I am seized and dragged away to something unseen and frightful. "Hush, baby," Mammy pleads with.me. "Hush, my baby." But I cannot hush. I have felt cruelty, and I shall never forget. Some- thing deep down in me has, for the first time, awak— ened, something with a passionate, tormented hatred of merciless strength, with a heartbreaking pity for the abused and inarticulate, for all the helpless victims of life, everywhere (WW, pp. 9-10). In the second incident, etched indelibly upon her childish nmmory, an old negro, identified as Uncle Henry, was being taken forcibly from.his cellar home and being placed in a cart which Ellen later learned belonged to the almshouse. But he does not want to go to the almshouse. He is still young enough to dread that. He struggles; he fights off the men who hold him; he cries out in a loud mournful voice, "Don't put me in! Don't put me .in:" . . . suddenly, I stop and burst into tears. A flood of misery pours over me. I am.lost and help- less. Nothing that I can do will step them from.tak- ing the old man away. Nothing that I can do will keep the old man from crying out in his grieving voice that he does not want to be taken. Nothing that I can do will make the world different (WW, pp. 10a11). The significance of these two experiences Miss Glasgow summed 'up in the following words: "Ever since I watched the black dog pursued by the cruel men, and old Uncle Henry taken, screaming, to the almshouse, life, in my imagination, was divided between the stronger and the weaker, the fortunate and the unfortunate. Either by fate or by choice, I had found myself on the side of the weaker" (WW, p. 59). Ellen Glasgow's exceedingly, almost pathologically, sen- sitive nature is again revealed in some of the experiences I fl‘. . sl- I ‘which she recorded from the happy summer days at Jerdone Castle. She and her mammy had given a name to every tree on the big lawn: There was Godwin, the giant elm; Charles, the oak; and Alfred, the shivering aspen. "I remember running out at night," she recounted, "when I was only half dressed, to clasp my arms, as far as they would go, round a beech, because somebody had cut into the bark, and I was sure that it was hurt" (WW, p. 27). Another deeply memorable experi- ence, which occurred in the city, involved her having robbed a squirrel of his hoard of chestnuts and then, having been stricken with remorse, trying vainly the following frosty morning to replace them in the empty hole. There were so many trees, however, each one looking like all the others, that her attempt at restoration was unsuccessful. "On cold nights, or when the snow was on the ground," she recalled, "I would think of that plundered squirrel and wonder if he and his family were hungry" (WW, p. 57). Ellen Glasgow was all of her life passionately attached to animals.5 She never forgave her father for giving her pointer, Pat, to an indif- .ferent overseer when he sold Jerdone Castle and for refusing to permit her to take the dog to Richmond. Miss Glasgow 'believed that this "incident was one of the things, but not ‘ 5Ellen Glasgow founded the Richmond branch of the Soci- ety for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. See Robert Van Gelder, "An Interview with Ellen Glasgow," 3113 We! York Times 33‘ ook Review, (Oct. 18, 1942), p. 21. Is...— 9..., . ”“1 Inc: V I-‘IO" .. " he s ,.‘ :.'. 00 n“ ‘, .. " “ N -., I" 0.. in W. I. A..‘ ' I .~.' . '- s n. 5.... w the only thing, that encouraged a childish affliction of nerv- ous sensibility" (WW, p. 28). Because of this nervous sensibility Ellen Glasgow had almost no formal schooling. She very early had learned to read by picking out the letters in Ql_<_i_ Mortality. This had been made necessary by her impatience to know what came next in this story which was being read to her by her Aunt Rebecca, who was a delightful story-teller and who spent much time read- ing to the children from the Waverley novels. When Ellen was about seven or eight, she was sent to school, but the experi- ence of the first day was so harrowing to this painfully shy and over-sensitive child that she came home with one of the nervous headaches which prostrated her as even a very young child. The family physician put her to bed, and doubtlessly recommended, she wrote, that she not be sent back to school. In any event, this ended her formal education until the fam- ily moved to the big gray house at One West Main Street, in 1887, after which she went to school for several months each year, until her health grew frail again and her nervous head- aches returned (WW, p. 69). But despite the questionable dis- advantage of lacking a formally-disciplined education, Ellen at the age of seventeen was able to pass an examination in economics given by Dr. George Frederick Holmes, professor of political economy at the University of Virginia. Since women were not admitted to the classrooms of Mr. Jefferson's Uni- Versity, the examination was administered in the professor's \J o.-.. ‘No. " 10 study, but he used the examination papers given to his stu- dents, and Miss Glasgow reported that she "passed with dis- tinction" (WW, p. 78). She was able to do this because she ‘was an omnivorous reader and had at her disposal the contents of her own father's very fine library as well as books which she secured elsewhere. Later she had the stimulating instruc- tion of George Walter McCormack, "a sound and brilliant thinker . . . [who] exercised a vital influence over . . . [her] intel- lectual outlook" (WW, p. 79). McCormack, who married Ellen's favorite sister, Cary, discussed with her such then disturbing books as Henry George's Progress and Poverty. It was largely due to the influence of McCormack that "in the Victorian twi— light of Richmond, when it seemed as unbecoming for a lady to think as to affect knickers"6 and charming ladies began and ended their earnest inquiries "with such fundamental verities as the superiority of man and the aristocratic supremacy of the Episcopal Church,"7 that Ellen Glasgow was reading the classical economists and the writings of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. In her autobiography Miss Glasgow wrote that she believed leer predispositions were formed, and the deepest impressions Inade on her mind, in the earliest years of her childhood-- certainly, she said, before she was eight years old. In one ‘ 6Sara Haardt "Ellen Glasgow and the South," The Bookman, LXIX (April. 1929). 133. -— ——-— 7Loc. cit. ‘u' .s.‘ D . ”“q i... '. OI 11 area, at least, this is indisputably true. She could not remember the time when she did not want to be a writer. In the collection of her critical prefaces to the twelve novels included in the Virginia Edition of her works and published, with an essay on £11 _'I§_l__i_§_ Q_u_r_ Life, under the title A Certain Measure, Miss Glasgow recounted her earliest creative experi- ences. The truth is that I began being a novelist, as naturally as I began talking or walking, so early that I cannot remember when the impulse first seized me. Far back in my childhood, before I had learned the letters of the alphabet, a character named Little Willie wandered into the country of my mind, Just as every other*maJor character in my novels has strolled across my mental horizon when I was not expecting him, when I was not even thinking of the novel in which he would finally take his place. From what or where he had sprung, why he was named Little Willie, or why I should have selected a hero instead of a heroine--all this is still as much of a mystery to me as it was in my childhood. But there he was, and there he remained, alive and active, threading his own adventures, from the time I was three until I was seven or eight, and discovered Hans Andersen and Grimms' Fai Tales. Every night, as I was undressed and pu 0 Bed By my coloured Mammy, the romance of Little Willie would begin again exactly where it had broken off the eve- ning before. In winter, I was undressed in the fire- light on the hearth-rug; but in summer, we moved over to an open window, which looked out on the sunset, and presently on the first stars in the long green twilight. For years Little Willie lasted, never growing older, always pursuing his own narrative agd weaving his situations out of his own personality. Itt was in her seventh summer, however, that Miss Glasgow became a writer, and began to pray nightly, "0 God, let me \ 8(New'YOrk, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 19u3), pp. 192- .193. Hereinafter references to this work will be identified in the text by the symbol 9W. 12 write books: Please, God, let me write books!" (WW, p. 36). Her earliest recorded creative efforts were in the field of poetry and left her heart singing. "For days my new happi- ness lasted," she wrote, "as if I had entered some hidden forest of wonder and delight. I wandered 'lonely as a cloud' in that strange exile to which all writers who are born and not made are condemned" (WW, p. 37). This childish ecstasy was abruptly shattered one morning not long after when Ellen heard an older sister reading the verses aloud to her guests; their "burst of kindly ridicule and amusement" echoed loudly in her ears. The bitter humiliation of this experience might have been responsible, Miss Glasgow concluded, for the sensi- tiveness which she forever after felt about her work. undoubt- edly, it also had much to do with the sharp hostility which she always felt toward her older sisters. Miss Glasgow's first written story, like her first poem, was done at the age of seven, "Only a Daisy in a Garden of Roses, an allegory, which she said was done in "a kind of childish prose-poetry" (_w_w_. p. 53). This title is not with- <>ut significance; it early struck what was to be a‘recurrent 1'lote in her mature work. From this time on, she never ceased tka'write, although she wrote always in secret. Until after l"Aer first book was completed, no one except her mother so much as suspected that she "was already innuersed in some dark stream QI." identity, stronger and deeper and more relentless than the efitter-rial movement of living. It was not," Miss Glasgow N:O . ‘0'! . I ._ 4'." F n...“ ..__ ‘1'";u h. .. ‘ U Q “r4 . l.‘ ~. L, . C 5.. a... M.. . O I I ‘K‘ II 'I O‘." 5 h ' I \‘ o ‘."| l (1 b. ' s O i ““.b.‘. .‘.~‘ ‘ ‘ . A. ‘ l.“ . '-..‘.‘- l3 declared, "that I had so early found my vocation. At the age of seven my vocation had found me. . . . I was born a novel- ist, though I formed myself into an artist" (WW, p. 141). Miss Glasgow's first novel, unpublished, entitled Sharp Realities, was written by the time she was seventeen or eighteen years old. In response to an advertisement that she saw in a,magazine she sent the manuscript to "a 'distin- guished' literary critic, endorsed by many members of the Authors' Club, who could be induced, for the sum.of fifty dollars to give advice to young authors, and to assist them in selecting the right publisher" (WW, p. 95). The requisite fifty dollars, given to Ellen by her sister Cary, was a part of the wedding present given to Cary by her father. It was at this time that Ellen was permitted to make her first trip to New YOrk under the chaperonage of an ex-patriate "Southern lady who would receive, for a moderate sum, any number of girls of good families provided they stayed all in one room" (WW, p. 95). Ellen availed herself of this opportunity to Call upon her literary advisor. When, instead of discussing l1er work, he discussed her figure ("You are too pretty to be *1 novelist. Is your figure as lovely in the altogether as it 13 in your clothes?") and attempted to kiss her ("His mouth, beneath his gray moustache, was red and Juicy, and it gave me 15‘ orever afterwards a loathing for red and Juicy lips), she “rested herself free and fled in disgust and anger, resolved lnever again to write. She sent a messenger to retrieve the 1h manuscript and when she received it, threw the parcel, un- opened, into the fireplace. Of this still-born work, Miss Glasgow has said: "My revolt from the philosophy of evasive idealism was seeking an outlet. I hated-~I had always hated --the inherent falseness in much Southern tradition, and §E§£E Realities was an indignant departure from the whole sentimen- tal fallacy, not only in the South, but all over America" (fl. p. 97). If one is to understand with any preciseness exactly what it was that Ellen Glasgow was in revolt against, one must survey the social and literary scene of the 1890's. It is necessary for one to know something of the intellectual temper of Richmond and the South, to see what kind of product domi- t noted the literary scene, and to determine how it had acquired its stranglehold. Only then can one identify "the harsher i realities" about which Miss Glasgow was determined to write, I the "ugly aspects" she would explore, and evaluate the extent 3’ to which she achieved her purpose and the significance of her achievement. The decade in which Ellen Glasgow began to write, that