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Ellen Glasgow and History: The Battle-Ground

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

C. Hugh Holman
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Extract

That Ellen Glasgow was the grande dame of One West Main Street, Richmond, Virginia, is a fact known to everyone. That as a novelist she was from the beginning a part of the modern southern literary tradition and that she was shaped by the same fundamental impulses which went to make the “Southern Renascence” has been less widely understood. This fact has resulted in part from the circumstance that much of her work was written early in this century and that before the spectacular upheaval in southern writing which marked the 1930s, she had established a secure position, which she did not elect to desert when the winds of a newer modernism began to blow.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 2 , October 1977 , pp. 385 - 398
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1977

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References

NOTES

1. Holman, C. Hugh, “Ellen Glasgow and the Southern Literary Tradition,” Southern Writers: Appraisals in Our Time, ed. Simonini, R. C. Jr (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1964), pp. 103–23.Google Scholar

2. Rubin, Louis D. Jr., The Writer in the South: Studies in a Literary Community (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1972)Google Scholar; Simpson, Lewis P., “The Southern Novelist and Southern Nationalism” and “The Southern Writer and the Great Literary Secession,” both in his The Man of Letters in New England and the South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1973).Google Scholar

3. Glasgow, Ellen, A Certain Measure: An Interpretation of Prose Fiction (New York: Harcourt, Brace Co., 1943), p. 264.Google Scholar

4. Tuttleton, James W., The Novel of Manners in America (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1972), pp. 7–27Google Scholar; Trilling, Lionel, “Manners, Morals, and the Novel,” The Liberal Imagination (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1950).Google Scholar

5. See Holman, C. Hugh, “April in Queenborough: Ellen Glasgow's Comedies of Manners,” Sewanee Review, 82 (Spring 1974), 263–83.Google Scholar

6. Baker, Ernest A., The History of the English Novel (London: Methuen, 1935), VI, 135–38Google Scholar; Barzun, Jacques, Romanticism and the Modern Ego (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1944), pp. 85–86.Google Scholar

7. Certain Measure, p. 3.Google Scholar

8. Ibid.

9. Glasgow, Ellen, The Woman Within (New York, 1954), p. 129.Google Scholar

10. Woman Within, p. 181.Google Scholar

11. Certain Measure, p. 4.Google Scholar

12. Ibid., p. 3–5, 48–49, 66–72, and passim.

13. Cabell, James Branch, As I Remember It: Some Epilogues in Recollection (New York: The McBride Co., 1955), pp. 219–21.Google Scholar

14. See Patterson, Daniel W., “Ellen Glasgow's Plan for a Social History of Virginia,” Modern Fiction Studies, 5 (Winter 1959), 353–60Google Scholar; Steele, Oliver L., “Ellen Glasgow, Social History, and the ‘Virginia Edition,’” Modern Fiction Studies, 7 (Summer 1961), 173–76Google Scholar; MacDonald, Edgar E., “The Glasgow-Cabell-Entente,” American Literature, 41 (03 1969), 76–91.Google Scholar

15. Murr, Judy Smith, “History in Barren Ground and Vein of Iron: Theory, Structure, and Symbol,” Southern Literary Journal, 8 (Fall 1975), 39–54Google Scholar, despite its ostensible subject, does not deal with the issues of the relationship of history and fiction; rather, it deals with the synecdochical substitution of individual fictional lives for the larger sense of history.

16. Certain Measure, p. 72.Google Scholar

17. Woman Within, p. 104.Google Scholar

18. She declared that she realized on publishing her first book that she “needed a technique of writing” (Woman Within, p. 123)Google Scholar and A Certain Measure demonstrates her continuing concern with fictional technique.

19. Certain Measure, p. 11.Google Scholar

20. Woman Within, p. 24.Google Scholar

21. Ibid., p. 47.

22. Ibid., p. 120.

23. Certain Measure, pp. 16–17.Google Scholar

24. Lukács, Georg, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah, and Mitchell, Stanley (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), p. 35.Google Scholar

25. Lukács, , p. 58.Google Scholar

26. Kroeber, Karl, Romantic Narrative Art (Madison, Wis., 1960), p. 173.Google Scholar

27. Woman Within, p. 128.Google Scholar

28. Certain Measure, p. 16.Google Scholar

29. Ibid., p. 24.

30. Glasgow, Ellen, The Battle-Ground, Old Dominion edition (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran Co., 1929), p. vii.Google Scholar

31. Certain Measure, p. 12.Google Scholar

32. Woman Within, pp. 64, 38–40.Google Scholar

33. Certain Measure, p. 20.Google Scholar

34. Woman Within, p. 38.Google Scholar

35. Ibid., pp. 38–40, 64.

36. Simms, W. Gilmore, Mellichampe: A Legend of the Santee (New York, 1853), p. 30Google Scholar

37. [Simms, William Gilmore], “Ellet's Women of the Revolution,” Southern Quarterly Review, 17 (1850), 351.Google Scholar

38. Certain Measure, p. 21Google Scholar; The Battle-Ground (Old Dominion ed.), p. viii.Google Scholar

39. Certain Measure, p. 21.Google Scholar

40. Godbold, E. Stanly Jr., Ellen Glasgow and the Woman Within (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1972), p. 59.Google Scholar

41. Santas, Joan Foster, Ellen Glasgow's American Dream (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1965), p. 55n.Google Scholar

42. Certain Measure, p. 6.Google Scholar

43. Godbold, , p. 59.Google Scholar

44. Certain Measure, p. 21.Google Scholar

45. Ibid., p. 6.

46. Rouse, Blair, ed., Letters of Ellen Glasgow (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1958), p. 30.Google Scholar

47. Certain Measure, p. 19.Google Scholar

48. The Battle-Ground (Old Dominion ed.), p. viii.Google Scholar

49. An excellent, appreciative discussion of these two novels of Mary Johnston's is Nelson, Lawrence G., “Mary Johnston and the Historic Imagination,” in Southern Writers: Appraisals in Our Time, pp. 71–102.Google Scholar

50. Lively, Robert A., Fiction Fights the Civil War (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1957), pp. 32–33Google Scholar. The date of her birth represents a common error. She was born in 1873; see DAB, Supplement Three, p. 302.

51. The Battle-Ground (Old Dominion ed.), p. vii–viii.Google Scholar

52. Santas, Joan (p. 51)Google Scholar cites Page, Thomas Nelson's picture of southern Unionists who fought in the Confederate army, in The Old Dominion: Her Making and Manners (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1908), pp. 240–41Google Scholar, as evidence of the accuracy of the portrayal of Peyton Ambler.

53. Santas, Joan (p. 55)Google Scholar cites Bagby, George W.'s The Old Virginia Gentleman and Other Sketches (New York, 1910)Google Scholar, on the accuracy of this view of how young Virginians went off to war.

54. Certain Measure, p. 13.Google Scholar

55. Ibid.

56. Ibid.

57. Certain Measure, p. 22.Google Scholar

58. Ibid.

59. Lively, , pp. 63, 191.Google Scholar

60. The Battle-Ground (New York, 1902), pp. 442–43.Google Scholar

61. Ibid., p. 427.

62. Ibid., pp. 478–79.

63. Ibid., p. 484.

64. Ibid., p. 485.

65. In a speech before the Southern Writers Conference, cited in Godbold, , p. 244.Google Scholar

66. The Battle-Ground (1902 ed.), pp. 492–93.Google Scholar

67. Ibid., p. 494.

68. Letters, pp. 153, 154Google Scholar and her review of So Red the Rose in the 07 22, 1934Google Scholar, New York Herald Tribune Books; Letters, p. 214Google Scholar; Auchincloss, Louis, Glasgow, Ellen (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1964), p. 12.Google Scholar

69. Letters, pp. 113–15, 118–20, 123–35, 136–42.Google Scholar

70. Certain Measure, p. 66.Google Scholar