The Wheel of Life

by Ellen Glasgow

As the light fell on her face Gerty Bridewell awoke stifled a yawn with her pillow and remembered that she had been very unhappy when she went to bed.

352 pages, Paperback

Published January 31, 2007

About the author

American writer Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow won a Pulitzer Prize for In This Our Life (1941), her realistic historical novel of Virginia.

Born into an upper-class Virginian family, Glasgow at an early age rebelled against traditional expectations of women and authored 20 bestselling novels. Southern settings of the majority of her novels reflect her awareness of the enormous social and economic changes, occurring in the South in the decades before her birth and throughout her own life.

Beginning in 1897, she wrote her novels and many short stories, mainly about life in Virginia.
Glasgow read widely to compensate for her own rudimentary education. She maintained a close lifelong friendship with James Branch Cabell, another notable writer of Richmond. She spent many summers at the historic Jerdone Castle plantation estate of her family in Bumpass, Virginia; this venue reappears in her writings. Her works include: The Descendant (1897), Phases of an Inferior Planet (1898), The Voice of the People (1900), The Battle- Ground (1902), The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields (1904), The Romance of a Plain Man (1909), Virginia (1913), The Builders (1919), The Past (1920), Barren Ground (1925), The Romantic Comedians (1926), They Stooped to Folly (1929), The Sheltered Life (1932), Vein of Iron (1935), In This Our Life (1941).

Reviews

[Bettie]

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14696

Opening:
CHAPTER I

IN WHICH THE ROMANTIC HERO IS CONSPICUOUS BY HIS ABSENCE


As the light fell on her face Gerty Bridewell awoke, stifled a yawn with her pillow, and remembered that she had been very unhappy when she went to bed. That was only six hours ago, and yet she felt now that her unhappiness and the object of it, which was her husband, were of less disturbing importance to her than the fact that she must get up and stand for three minutes under the shower bath in her dressing-room. With a sigh she pressed the pillow more firmly under her cheek, and lay looking a little wistfully at her maid, who, having drawn back the curtains at the window, stood now regarding her with the discreet and confidential smile which drew from her a protesting frown of irritation.

It was Judy who turned me onto Ellen Glasgow and EG should certainly be wider read IMHO

4* Barren Ground (1902)
CR The Wheel of Life (1906)
3* The Sheltered Life (1932)

[Cera · Rating 4 out of 5]

Okay, in review I clearly like Glasgow's novels set in urban environments more than the ones set in the rural South. My main memory of it is that it's the earliest description of problematic cocaine addiction (as opposed to the recreational cocaine use of Sherlock Holmes, say) I'd ever seen, and I was fascinated by the way this was handled. There are many love stories, some shallow, some deep, and some self-sacrificing which I found sympathetic, and as I write this I'm coming to the conclusion I really need to reread it, because my vague memories are so intriguing.

[Laura]

Available at: Arthurs Classic Novels or at Project Gutenberg.

[Ashley · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this 1906 novel, Ellen Glasgow describes the lives of a New York poet, Laura, her socialite friend from childhood, Gerty, and their various acquaintances, including a publisher and several members of their families and social set. There were several flaws with the book. Laura's doomed relationship with Kemper is not especially realistic and a story line about an aspiring playwright and his relationship with a young woman living as a starving artist who cannot find anyone to publish her work is completely dropped before it seems finished. This is one of the few novels Glasgow set outside of her home state of Virginia and describes a good deal of the fashion and societal trends of the period.

"Do you understand that? .... that we're all drawn by wires like puppets, and the strongest wire pulls us in the direction in which we are meant to go? It's curious that I should never have known this before because it has become perfectly plain to me now--there is no soul, no aspiration, no motive for good or evil, for we're everyo one worked by wires while we are pretending to move ourselves."

Then his vision broadened, and he looked from Connie's life to the lives of men and women who were more fortunate than she; but all human existence, everywhere one and the same, showed to him as the ceaseless struggle after the illusion of a happiness which had no part in any possession nor in any object. He thought of Laura, with the radiance or her illusion still upon her; of Gerty, groping after the torn and soiled shreds of hers; of Kemper, stripped of his and yet making the pretence that it had not left him naked; of Perry Bridewell, dragging his through the defiling mire that led to emptiness; and then of all the miserable multitude of those that live for pleasure. And he saw them, one and all, bound to the wheel which turned even as he looked."