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

- subject:

(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