The Shadowy Third: And Other Stories

by Ellen Glasgow, Gina R. Collia (Introduction)

Ellen Glasgow wrote only thirteen short stories during her long career, seven of which appeared in 'The Shadowy Third'. Published in 1923 by Doubleday, Page & Company, it was the only collection of short stories published during her lifetime. Of the seven tales it contains, only four are supernatural, but all have an eerie quality to them; in fact, ‘Jordan’s End’, a non-ghost story, is the most ghostly story that the author ever wrote. This new edition contains the seven stories included in the first edition and adds to those tales a seventeen-page biographical essay by Gina R. Collia, ‘Ellen Glasgow: The Solitary Spirit’.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

230 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1923

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

[Alwynne]

The title story is superb, unsettling, feminist, with a marvellous sense of place. But I found her other stories far less appealing mainly because of her fascination with the American South and her elegiac attitude towards the "lost" Confederacy.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25⭐

The Shadowy Third 5⭐
Dare’s Gift 4.5⭐
The Past 4⭐
Whispering Leaves 4.25⭐
A Point in Morals 5⭐
The Difference 4⭐
Jordan’s End 3⭐

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been reading fin-de-siècle and early twentieth century supernatural fiction for years now, and yet I had never heard of Ellen Glasgow until I encountered her story "Jordan's End" in the Weird Women: Classic Supernatural Fiction by Groundbreaking Female Writers, 1852-1923 anthology that came out earlier this year. That such talented female authors fall into obscurity time and again is a literary tragedy. The Shadowy Third and Other Stories is a fantastic collection of paranormal and early Southern Gothic works written with vivid prose and a careful attention to psychological detail. Strongly recommended if you enjoy Mary E. Wilkins Freeman.

[Camilla Guimarães · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nunca tinha ouvido falar da autora e fiquei completamente apaixonada pelo seu estilo de escrita. Contos que mexem contigo e de uma riqueza de detalhes sem ser pedante. Amei 🥰

[Elizabeth Huffman · Rating 5 out of 5]

the last two touch on gender- def something to look back on when I draft the Southern literature portion of my senior capstone.

[Jeff Hobbs · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read so far:

The shadowy third --3
Dare's gift --2
The past --2
Whispering leaves --4
A point in morals --3
The difference --4
Jordan's end--3
***
A woman of tomorrow--2