Ellen Glasgow – författare

This autobiography depicts the spiritual landscape against which Ellen Glasgow's novels were written. The introduction examines her composition of "The Woman Within", surveys critical responses since its publication, examines unpublished portions and discusses the implications of the text.

Opening in the years just before the First World War, and set in the Valley of Virginia, this novel traces the experience of a family with four generations of women.

The novels of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ellen Glasgow ushered the South into the modern era, rejecting the typically romanticized approach for a cunningly observed realism. Glasgow's originality of mind and abiding fascination with her native South are in abundant display in this new selection of her correspondence with women. Covering more than sixty years, Perfect Companionship collects some 250 letters to and from Glasgow, many published here for the first time. The correspondents include Glasgow's family members, as well as prominent Richmonders. Also included are letters to and from authors such as Radclyffe Hall, Margaret Mitchell, and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, artists Malvina Hoffman and Clare Leighton, publishing figures Blanche Knopf and Irita Van Doren, and spouses of literary and academic figures such as Eleanor Brooks, wife of Van Wyck Brooks, and Bessie Zaban Jones, wife of Howard Mumford Jones. The letters are set in their proper context by a wealth of useful features, including a substantial introduction, a complete chronology of Glasgow's life, a comprehensive calendar listing all of her known correspondence with women, and a biographical register identifying all correspondents and persons mentioned in the letters. The result is a collection valuable not only to Glasgow scholars but also to any reader drawn to the South and the great contribution made by women to its literature and culture.

Captures the war''s human toll and explores its social consequences The Battle-Ground, Ellen Glasgow''s fourth novel, was her first bestseller, with more than 21,000 copies sold in just two weeks. The novel committed her to a project almost unparalleled in American literary history: a novelistic meditation on the South from the decade before the Confederacy to the middle of the 20th century. The Battle-Ground speaks of a South before and during the Civil War in its struggles to become part of a nation still in the making. The overthrow of the aristocratic tradition, the transfer of hereditary power to a rural underclass, the continued disenfranchisement of African Americans, and the evolving status of women--these topics, which came to bind the more than a dozen volumes of Glasgow''s self-styled "social history," initially coalesced in The Battle-Ground.

The Battle-Ground conspicuously departs from the tradition of Southern romances popularized by Thomas Nelson Page, and contemporary reviewers praised the book for its historical accuracy. Glasgow, an ardent Anglophile, bragged that military officers in Great Britain studied its descriptions of battle. With her, realism had not only crossed the Atlantic, it had "crossed the Potomac."

But Glasgow never sensationalizes the Civil War, whose bloodiest scenes she flanks with domestic officers, the sharing of rations, the warmth of camp, and reminders of home. Her vision of the war centers less on its corruption or barbarity than on its occasions for small decencies and their power of humanization. Glasgow cannot separate the war from its greater social implications--it is a place, as her title suggests, that tests the soul of a nation as well as individual men and women. The importance of The Battle-Ground in Southern literary history cannot be overemphasized, for Glasgow''s reimagining of the Civil War had a profound impact on the next generation of Southern writers, including Allen Tate, Stark Young, and Margaret Mitchell.