page_title: Ellen Glasgow
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Ellen Glasgow / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: Ellen Glasgow
context_page_description: Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow was an American novelist who won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1942. A lifelong Virginian who published 20 books including seven novels which sold well as well as gained critical acclaim, Glasgow portrayed the changing world of the contemporary South, differing from the idealistic escapism that characterized Southern literature after Reconstruction.
context_section_description: During more than four decades of literary work, Glasgow published 20 novels, a collection of poems, a book of short stories, and a book of literary criticism. Her first novel, The Descendant (1897) was written in secret and published anonymously when she was 24 years old. She destroyed part of the manuscript after her mother died in 1893. Publication was further delayed because her brother-in-law and intellectual mentor, George McCormack, died the following year. Thus Glasgow completed her novel in 1895. It features an emancipated heroine who seeks passion rather than marriage.  Although it was published anonymously, her authorship became well known the following year, when her second novel, Phases of an Inferior Planet (1898), announced on its title page, "by Ellen Glasgow, author of The Descendant."
  By the time The Descendant was in print, Glasgow had finished Phases of an Inferior Planet. The novel portrays the demise of a marriage and focuses on "the spirituality of female friendship."  Critics found the story to be "sodden with hopelessness all the way though," but "excellently told." Glasgow stated that her third novel, The Voice of People (1900) was an objective view of the poor-white farmer in politics.  The hero is a young Southerner who, having a genius for politics, rises above the masses and falls in love with a higher class girl. Her next novel, The Battle-Ground (1902), sold over 21,000 copies in the first two weeks after publication.  It depicts the South before and during the Civil War and was hailed as "the first and best realistic treatment of the war from the southern point of view."
  Much of her work was influenced by the romantic interests and human relationships that Glasgow developed throughout her life. The Deliverance (1904) and her previous novel, The Battle-Ground, were written during her affair with Gerald B. They "are the only early books in which Glasgow's heroine and hero are united" by the novels' ends. The Deliverance, published in 1904, was the first Glasgow book to garner popular success. The novel portrays a romance built on the dramatic relationship between the hero and the heroine due to traditional class constraints. The hero is an aristocrat turned into a common laborer after the events of the Civil War, and the heroine lacks the aristocratic lineage but obtains aristocratic qualities such as education and refinement. The genuine affection and reconciliation of the romance of the two were attempts by Glasgow to prove that “traditional class consciousness should be inconsequential to love affairs.” The Deliverance criticizes the institution of marriage because Glasgow herself faced social barriers that prevented her from marrying at that time. The Deliverance is notable for offering “a naturalistic treatment of class conflicts” that emerge after Reconstruction, providing realistic views of social changes in Southern literature.
  Glasgow's next four novels were written in what she considered her "earlier manner"  and received mixed reviews. The Wheel of Life (1906) sold moderately well based on the success of The Descendant. Despite its commercial success, however, reviewers found the book disappointing. Set in New York (the only novel not set in Virginia), the story tells of domestic unhappiness and tangled love affairs. It was unfavorably compared to Edith Wharton's House of Mirth, which was published that same year. Most critics recommended that Glasgow "stick to the South." Glasgow regarded the novel as a failure.
  The Ancient Law (1908) portrayed white factory workers in the Virginia textile industry, and analyzes the rise of industrial capitalism and its corresponding social ills. Critics considered the book overly melodramatic. With The Romance of a Plain Man (1909) and The Miller of Old Church (1911) Glasgow began concentrating on gender traditions; she contrasted the  conventions of the Southern woman with the feminist viewpoint, a direction which she continued in Virginia (1913).
  As the United States women's suffrage movement was developing in the early 1900s, Glasgow marched 
caption: Ellen Glasgow.
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