The Difference

by Ellen Gholson Glasgow

1904. Glasgow's realistic fiction novels often showed the female characters as stronger than the male characters. It was this new type of Southern fiction that made Ellen Glasgow one of the major writers of her time. The vantage point from which most of her nineteen novels were written was her native home of Richmond, Virginia.

She received the Pulitzer prize in 1942 for 'In This Our Life'. In 1900, with the publication of 'The Voice of the People', Glasgow began a series of novels which came to compose her ambitious fictional social history of Virginia.

This series includes 'The Battle Ground', a Civil War novel, and this volume, 'The Deliverance', which tells of the aftermath of the Civil War, when the Southern social order underwent wrenching change.

See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.

Genres: Southern, American Fiction

14 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1904

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/2384

Opening: When the Susquehanna stage came to the daily halt beneath the blasted pine at the cross-roads, an elderly man, wearing a flapping frock coat and a soft slouch hat, stepped gingerly over one of the muddy wheels, and threw a doubtful glance across the level tobacco fields, where the young plants were drooping in the June sunshine.

"So this is my way, is it?" he asked, with a jerk of his thumb toward a cloud of blue-and-yellow butterflies drifting over a shining puddle—"five miles as the crow flies, and through a bog?"

4* Barren Ground
3* The Sheltered Life
CR The Romantic Comedians
TR The Deliverance

[Laura · Rating 2 out of 5]

Free download available at Project Gutenberg.

I must confess this was not an easy reading for me, especially the beginning of the book with plenty of southern dialects.

4* Barren Ground
3* The Shadowy Third

[L. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Christopher Blake should have been born into a world of wealth and privilege on his family's tobacco plantation. The Civil War and the conniving Bill Fletcher stole that world away. Now the Blakes must suffer in genteel poverty while Christopher slowly (perhaps too slowly) exacts his revenge.

The book goes on way too long. The writing is rather dry and I admit I skimmed through most of it.

If you do decide to read this book remember, it was written in the early 1900's so there's plenty of racism. As well as misogyny, which I found rather odd since the author was a woman.

[Pam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really liked this story of vengeance and its cost to your soul. It's set in the South in the late 1800's. Young Christopher Blake sets out to ruin a man who cheated his family and he does it by ruining the man's grandson. For a book published in 1904, it was remarkably free of stereotypes. The minor characters were at least as interesting as the major ones, especially Tom Spade's virtuous wife. I'll be looking for more by Glasgow.

[Vicki · Rating 4 out of 5]

I sometimes had to remind myself that this book was written in 1904. The story and the characters are still alive after almost 120 years. Fans of historical fiction/romance should enjoy this one. It is the real thing that many modern writers are trying to recreate.

[William Guerrant · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a lot of moonlight-and-magnolia silliness in this. Many of the characters are stereotypes. And the dialects aren't right.

But the story does draw in the reader (this one at least), and the writing is often beautiful.

"Nature was alive again, and he felt vaguely that in the resurrection surrounding him he must have his part--that in him as well as in the earth the spirit of life must move and put forth in gladness."

"She would have crucified her happiness with her own loyal hands rather than have dishonoured by so much as an unspoken hope the high excellences inscribed upon the tombstones of those mouldered dead."

"Beyond the cedars in the graveyard the sunrise flamed golden upon a violet background, and across the field of life-everlasting there ran a sparkling path of fire."

[Monzenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Something something allegory about the American identity, stuck between the "still young" experience of post-Civil War realities, and the beckoning of the "modern" 1900s. The ending is both surprising and visible from miles away, when one wears the naturally conservative lens of keeping tradition alive.

[oldgradstudent · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brisk emotional journey of a wife who finds out that her husband is having an affair. All set in one day. Deft, poignant, and a great example of one of her central themes - men are morally inferior. Each time I read Glasgow I am sad that I had not discovered her sooner!

[Ashley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel follows the conflict that occurs between a former overseer and a former plantation owner when their roles are reversed after the U.S. Civil War. Fletcher, the overseer, used money he had been taking from the Blakes through the years to buy the plantation out from under them when the elder Blake returns from war and finds himself impoverished and his land destroyed. The Blakes move into the old overseers house and the two families harbor resentments toward one another. The novel suggests that the gentility never leaves the Blakes in their poverty, just as it never comes to the Fletchers, in spite of their attempts to educate themselves and marry up.

[Cera · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't remember it as well as I'd like, but I recall being impressed by Glasgow's many-sided look at the effects of Reconstruction on a small town in the South; there's poor people who were once rich, rich people who were once poor, and slaves who are now free, all tangled up with each other. I hope I made better notes on paper somewhere...