Vein of Iron

by Ellen Glasgow

Ellen Glasgow considered Vein of Iron, published in 1935, to be her best work. "No novel has ever meant quite so much to me," she wrote a friend. The critics agreed; the book was favorably reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review and outsold all but one other work of fiction in the year of its publication.
Opening in the years just before the First World War and laid in the Valley of Virginia, the book traces the experience of a family with four generations of strong women. Faced with a crisis when the bread-winner, a philosopher-minister, is defrocked for his unorthodox views, the women provide the "vein of iron" which carries the family through removal to Richmond (Queensboro in the book), through war and depression until the final return to the mountains.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Historical Fiction, Historical, Novels, 20th Century, The United States Of America

462 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1935

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

[robin friedman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rereading Vein Of Iron

Ellen Glasgow (1873-1945) was a successful writer during her lifetime, but her work is too little known today. It is due for a revival. Glasgow lived most of her life in Richmond, Virginia, and was critically praised as an early naturalist writer. She attempted to describe the South without the romantic accretions of "Lost Cause" mythology that arose following the Civil War.

Glasgow wrote "Vein of Iron" in 1935, and the book placed second on the best-seller lists that year. It is typical for her work which bridged the gap between serious and popular literature. I first read this novel three years ago and was pleased to have the opportunity to reread it as part of a book group. I was surprised at how much I had missed -- and probably got wrong -- on my first reading. If serious literature can be characterized as a book that bears reading slowly and more than once, then "Vein of Iron" has met this standard for me.

The book is set primarily in rural Virginia from about 1901 through 1935 (running into the first term of President Roosevelt). The story centers on the Fincastle family of Scotch-Irish descent which has lived in what has become a rundown manse in the small fictional village of Ironside since before the Revolutionary War.

Several family members get a great deal of attention in the novel. Ada Fincastle is a young woman in love with a young man named Ralph McBride. She loses Ralph, as a result of a forced marriage to a rich, selfish girl, Janet Rowan, who claims Ralph got her pregnant. She ultimately marries Ralph, but only after a two-day torrid affair in the woods before the divorce between Ralph and Janet is concluded. Ralph returns from WW I cynical and disillusioned and the couple struggle to retain their love for one another.

Ada's father, John Fincastle, is the other major character in the story. Fincastle is a Presbyterian minister who has been defrocked "after he had told the Presbytery he rejected the God of Abraham but accepted the God of Spinoza." Fincastle has spent his life writing a multi-volume work of philosophy, heavily influenced by a combination of philosophical naturalism, German idealism, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, and, I think especially, Buddhism and Eastern thought. Glasgow herself was a religious seeker of an unorthodox cast who had been fascinated with Buddhism when young. I found her portrait of John Fincastle compelling.

The main characters also include Ada's grandmother as well as Fincastle's wife, who dies early in the book, and a character named Aunt Meggie all of whom retain traditional Presbyterian religious convictions and all of whom are sympathetically portrayed.

Much of the theme of the book is stated in the title, as the characters, regardless of their differences in religious outlook maintain their fortitude and strength in the face of difficulty, adversity, and change. Besides fortitude and interior toughness, the second large theme of the book, I think, is human compassion. As the family suffers and observes the suffering of others during the Great Depression, John and Ada, in particular, come to realize and to put into practice the value of limiting one's own egocentrism and trying to work to alleviate the sufferings of others. There is a Buddhist mantra that is repeated at several important places in this novel: "May all beings be delivered from suffering" -- known as the lovingkindness (or metta) meditation that seemed to me initially and still seems to me upon rereading to be at the heart of this book.

The book has excellent descriptions of life in rural Virginia and of the growth of the urban South in a larger fictitious city called Queenborough. Industrialization and the suffering resulting from the Depression are portrayed well. There are also sympathetic, non-stereotyped portrayals of African-Americans, uncommon in a work of this era.

For all the descriptions of place and the intensity of the love story, I still concluded on my reading that the main focus of this book was spiritual. Glasgow writes knowingly both of the loss of faith in traditional Western religions and also of the need for the spiritual values of wisdom, self-understanding, and compassion. Her book has a serious tone throughout and her quest remains distinctly modern.

I found, as I did when I first read "Vein of Iron" that much of the book is overwritten and that its tone is melodramatic in places. In spite of that, "Vein of Iron" works on many levels. The novel is primarily a picture of a timeless spiritual quest. It encourages the reader away from the materialism of the everyday, whether found in rural Virginia or anywhere else, to search for meaning, wisdom, and compassion, regardless of whether the reader finds these values within or without the boundaries of a traditional religious faith.

Robin Friedman

[Paul of Bethesda · Rating 5 out of 5]

The “vein of iron” referred to in the title of Virginia author Ellen Glasgow’s 1935 novel has nothing to do with the recognized mineral wealth of the Shenandoah Valley region where much of the novel is set. Rather, the term refers to the inner strength demonstrated by multiple generations of women facing one setback after another, from poverty to social intolerance, in the time from the First World War to the Great Depression.

Glasgow, a pioneering Southern realist in a time when too much Southern writing had been consumed in plantation myth-making and Confederate nostalgia, pursued her craft with diligence, publishing her first novel in 1897 (when she was just 24 years old), and drawing throughout her novelistic career upon her astute observations of life in Richmond, Virginia. By 1935, readers across the American South and the rest of the nation were finally taking overdue notice of Glasgow and her work, as Vein of Iron was one of the best-selling novels of that year. And like Glasgow’s other major novels, it demands and rewards reading by the people of more modern times.

Most of Glasgow’s novels – works like The Romantic Comedians (1925) and The Sheltered Life (1932) – take place in Queenborough, Virginia (Glasgow’s fictionalized Richmond). By contrast, Vein of Iron is set mainly in the Shenandoah Valley, in the fictional mountain town of Ironside, Virginia. By switching up her setting in this manner, Glasgow seized the opportunity to take a fictive look into the lives of her Scots ancestors who had brought from Scotland to Virginia their devout Presbyterianism, their fierce work ethic, and their readiness to fight any enemy that might present itself, from Shawnee warriors to the Union Army.

Vein of Iron focuses upon the situation of three generations of the Fincastle family of Ironside, from the perspective of the novel’s protagonist, Ada Fincastle, a character whom the reader follows from childhood through middle age. From Ada’s point of view, the reader learns how these three generations of Fincastles have dealt with the considerable travails of poverty and social dislocation that the family has faced.

The elder generation of Fincastles is represented by Ada’s grandmother, who finds meaning in her devotion to the Presbyterian faith. For her, all questions of life can be answered through unquestioning fidelity to the Calvinist version of the Christian religion. All things are as they should be, the outcome of events is predestined by God, and that is that.

And yet, unsurprisingly, the following generations hold somewhat differing perspectives. The grandmother’s son John took a different path – one that brought on the family crisis that has placed the Fincastles in Ironside as of the novel’s beginnings. Initially, the reader learns, John Fincastle went into the ministry, and became the minister at one of the most prestigious congregations in Queenborough. Yet his philosophical and questioning spirit caused him to begin working on a massive philosophic treatise titled God as Idea – not exactly the sort of thing likely to endear him to a synod of sternly Calvinist church elders. By the time the novel’s action begins, John Fincastle has already been defrocked; the family has returned to the old ancestral home in Ironside, and John Fincastle scrapes out a minimal living as a schoolteacher.

John’s wife Mary Evelyn, the daughter of Tidewater gentry, followed her heart and married John, defying her parents’ and her society’s wishes that she should secure the most economically advantageous marriage possible to the most “suitable” Queenborough gentleman. Living in poverty with the man she loves, Mary Evelyn’s solution is to decide to be happy. And she does so! It is not martyrdom; there is nothing passive-aggressive about it. She decides to be happy; and in the face of poverty and later illness, she is happy.

Young Ada, observing this complex family dynamic, has a questioning and searching spirit of her own. She hopes to find love with Ralph McBride, a bright young man who dreams of a career in the law; Ada and Ralph have been sweethearts since childhood. Yet Janet Rowan, a spoiled young woman from Ironside’s wealthiest family, seems to be setting her cap for Ralph, if only because Ralph likes Ada rather than Janet; and it is in the context of this budding love triangle that Glasgow’s idea of the “vein of iron” first enters the novel.

At a dance where Ralph has been drinking – not a good idea; Ralph doesn’t handle liquor well – Ralph has gotten into a quarrel with Janet that then morphed into a quarrel with Ada. Ralph declares that if Ada won’t take a walk outside the dance with him, he’ll take a walk with Janet, and eventually he does so. A heartbroken Ada, albeit still young, engages in some impressively mature reflections:

They were behaving like two children, Ada thought, two children who ought to know better. While she stood there and watched him cross the floor, it seemed to her that joy was slowly ebbing away from her heart. Yet something stronger than joy, the vein of iron far down in her inmost being, in her secret self, could not yield, could not bend, could not be broken. (p. 113)

For a time, it seems that Ralph and Ada will always be kept apart; Ralph is falsely accused of being the father of Janet’s unborn child, and in that ultraconservative time and place, “it is customary to believe the woman in such things.” Ada feels an understandable bitterness at older generations who are ready to condemn the people of younger generations to a life of unhappiness, simply because that is the way things have always been done. She horrifies her grandmother by declaring that she will not simply accept God’s will and move on.

Later, once Ralph has gained his freedom from Janet – who has long since begun seeking out a “better” marriage to a wealthier husband – Ralph and Janet enjoy a romantic interlude in the mountains, just before Ralph goes off to fight in the First World War. In the months that follow, Ada, pregnant with Ralph’s child, faces the stern disapproval of her grandmother because Ada will not repent of her “sin.” Alone, and anxious that Ralph might not return alive from the war, Ada thinks once again about her ancestors – women who survived difficult ordeals, including her great-great-grandmother Tod who endured a long period of Indian captivity:

How could they drop the past so easily, those pioneers, and plunge into the moment before them? They were hard, it was true, but it was the hardness of character. Unlovable they were, but heroic. Had they been soft to the touch of fate, the exiled Shawnees would still be roaming their lost hunting-grounds. Was the past broken off from the present? she mused, or did that vein of iron hold all the generations together? Sitting there, in touch with the land that had been won from the wilderness, she braced her own strength against that endurance, that hardness. (p. 209)

Eventually, Ralph does return from the Great War's battlefields, to Ada and their son Ranny. But he is a changed man – embittered and cynical; physically unwounded, but psychically scarred by what he saw on those European battlefields. As her mother Mary Evelyn had to draw upon her own inner strength to help John through his feelings of failure after John lost his ministry, so Ada must help Ralph find the strength to fulfill his potential.

The eventual relocation of the Fincastle family to Queenborough, Glasgow’s fictionalized Richmond, gives Glasgow a chance to comment on the improvident, pleasure-seeking mentality of the Jazz Age – it looks and sounds quite different here from the way it is depicted in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) – and to depict urban life during the Great Depression.

Indeed, Glasgow’s account of city life during the Depression – bread lines and soup lines; families selling their most cherished possessions; a couple taking their own lives, while making sure to leave enough money for a decent burial service – is one of the most compelling accounts of the period that I have read. For all the power of Glasgow’s descriptions of the Shenandoah Valley landscape and way of life in the novel’s Ironside passages, the parts of the novel dealing with Depression-era Queenborough seemed to me particularly evocative and deeply felt.

And I am not alone in that assessment. This University of Virginia Press reprinting of Vein of Iron includes a perceptive afterword by Anne Firor Scott, a pioneering scholar of Southern women’s history, and author of The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930 (1970). Scott writes in her afterword that “Although Glasgow saw the novel as being primarily ‘about’ the Valley and its people, the depiction of urban life in the 1920’s and early 1930’s is much the most powerful part of the book”, and praises the manner in which Glasgow “was able to create an altogether convincing portrait of a family struggling first to stay afloat and then, rather desperately, simply to survive” (p. 401).

The Fincastles, in Queenborough, face one potentially life-wrecking setback after another. Ada sells gloves at a department store, and mends gloves at night, but her hours and wages keep getting cut. John, the father, teaches at a girls’ school, but his students want him out; he’s too old for their tastes, and they want a young and “cute” teacher. And Ralph’s work in auto sales is derailed, and his life threatened, when a careless customer involves him in an auto accident that threatens his life and requires a long and expensive hospital stay. Against these setbacks, Ada reflects once again upon her determination to endure – for her own sake, and for that of her family:

Wherever you looked, there was something waiting to destroy happiness, Ada thought as she turned away. No sooner was a shelter found for the mind or the heart than the savage elements of cruelty and injustice swept up and demolished it. Shelters and systems and civilizations were all overwhelmed in time, her father said, by the backward forces of ignorance, of barbarism, of ferocity. Yet the level would steadily rise, little by little; in the end other unities would emerge from the ruins; and the indestructible will of the world was toward life. (p. 305)

The focus of the novel then turns, surprisingly, toward John Fincastle – who, desperately ill, and knowing that his life is nearing its end, goes on a quest of his own back toward Ironside, with an idea for saving his family from the poverty that threatens to destroy them. Any reader who has spent the novel thinking of John Fincastle as a figure like Ashley Wilkes from Gone With the Wind – a hapless philosophical dreamer who can’t get anything practical done – may be surprised by this turn of events in the novel. It ends up seeming as if John Fincastle may, after all, have a bit of that “vein of iron” that is so characteristic of the Fincastle women.

Vein of Iron achieves a kind of epic sweep as it recounts a multi-generational saga, taking a Virginia family through three tumultuous decades of small-town and big-city American life in the early 20th century. No wonder this novel finally brought Ellen Glasgow the popular success that she had long deserved. It is a pleasure traveling with Ada Fincastle along the narrative arc of this novel; and even the most cynical reader is likely to find him- or herself hoping that Ada will find some small measure of the happiness that she so clearly deserves.

[Elizabeth (Alaska) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve been working on a mini-challenge that targets women authors on Bloom’s Western Canon. This is extra challenging because the overwhelming majority of entries are by men, and the women also have a fair amount of poetry entries, which I don’t read. I was not unhappy to see this, including that my library had a copy. It might have been a long time before I read it.

The title is meant to convey strong women.

While she stood there and watched him cross the floor, it seemed to her that joy was slowly ebbing away from her heart. Yet something stronger than joy, the vein of iron far down in her inmost being, in her secret self, could not yield, could not bend, could not be broken.

Was the past broken off from the present? she mused, or did that vein of iron hold all the generations together? Sitting there, in touch with the land that had been won from the wilderness, she braced her own strength against that endurance, that hardness.

And one more quote ...

It was amazing, she thought, knotting the thread and smoothing the triangular patch on her knee, how many things one could find to laugh at on the brink of disaster. If only one took the world as one found it, and did not sit down and wait for something to happen!

This starts slowly. Though the family was poor (and as they said not as poor as many), life just seemed to tick along. I might not need much plot, but *something* has to happen. Then, sure enough, it did, and the story picked up from there. The novel opens in 1900 when Ada Fincastle is 10 years old. The next part, The Single Heart, skips ahead 10 years. It is here where the first quote above appears. There are 3 additional parts, which, in increments, move through the War and into the Depression.

Adversity is character building and Glasgow lets us see that. I’m afraid, however, that her characterizations were almost, but not quite, fully-fleshed. What I liked best is her prose. I’m a bit surprised to be writing that because it isn’t as smooth nor polished as others I’ve liked. It took longer to adjust to the rhythm than I’d expected. Yet, I did adjust. It fits perfectly well what she had to say.

I came to appreciate this book, though I never loved it. I can see its place on the Western Canon, which Harold Bloom wants us to believe is literature that tells us who we are as a civilization. Part of it takes place in the hills and mountains of Virginia where we see a way of life there. The other part takes place in a city during the Depression. I have not read much of either of these settings and times and I felt Glasgow portrayed them well. This is much better than 3-stars and yet not 5. I’m not sure where in the 4-star range it sits.

[polly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I will read it this fall, Ashley. I promiseth this.

**UPDATE: READ!!

This is an excellent book, and I don't think that for merely geographical reasons. Ellen Glasgow: why did I not know about her in college, or at least before Ashley introduced her to me after I was well into my 20s?

Set in the mountains of Virginia (happy sigh) during the first part of the 20th Century, the book follows Ada Fincastle (happy sigh) from childhood into her 40s-ish. The book ends during the Great Depression, and tracks the family through death, birth and scandal (as well as a move to the city). The last 10 pages are utterly wonderful. I had a hard time getting 'into' the book at first, despite its setting (happy sigh) but once the 'narrative hook' occurred, I was indeed hooked and the last 2/3-ish of the book caused me to lose sleep as I desperately read to uncover what would happen to Ada. the ending did not disappoint; it was perfect.

[Casey · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredible work of fiction that has been called a "comprehensive social history" of Virginia, which inspired the setting of the book. It follows a Ada Fincastle and her father, John Fincastle, as Ada grows up, marries, and moves to Queensborough during the early 1900's after WWI. Glasgow has been called the "first southern realist" who initiated the southern realist movement in literary fiction.
Vein of Iron refers to the fortitude of the "Presbyrterian spririt" that she saw exemplified in her Scotch-Irish family on her father's side.
Of particular note, the chronicling of a family moving from the rural south to an urban city and the psychological and emotional effects of such a move were very interesting. It is a "social history" that is very relateable and set up well by the novel's more slower-paced first quarter.
Glasgow was very pleased with her 20th novel calling it her "best and truest work" and saying, "I am thrilled by its quiet power and poetic insight" and went on to say "No novel has ever meant quite so much to me... it is long, thoughtful, tragic."

[Mshelton50 · Rating 4 out of 5]

The only work of Ellen Glasgow’s oeuvre that I had read prior to Vein of Iron was her The Romantic Comedians. Whereas the latter is concerned with the mores of genteel Richmond (“Queenborough” in Glasgow’s work) in the 1910s and ‘20s, the former focuses on a family from the upper Shenandoah Valley starting in the early 20th century. Along the way, the family will be transported to Richmond during the First World War. I have to admit that I like the heroine, Ada Fincastle, very much, and I thought Glasgow did an excellent job conveying the sheer emotional desperation of the early years of the Great Depression. I also admire her prose; apparently some critics dismissed it as conventional, but I think it has a fine quality to it. Would recommend the book to any lover of fiction, and will look for more of Glasgow’s work.

[Nann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Several years ago I bought this and Glasgow's The Sheltered Life, both still in the publisher's shrink-wrap, at the library book sale. A book club prompt to "read two by the same author" finally got me to read it.

Though it's Ada Fincastle's story from her girlhood in the 1890's to adulthood in the 1930's Glasgow deftly gives chapters to her scholar-father and her grandmother. Young love is deterred, then fulfilled. War comes, peacetime follows. The modern 20's bring prosperity, followed by the Great Depression. Through it all the "vein of iron" in all the Fincastles ties them to one another and to their century-old home in the Shenandoah Valley.

The book was published in 1935 and parts of it are very dated. The Black servants, of course; but also other social aspects. Father was a scholar and the family valued education. Why didn't Ada at least enroll at a normal school and become a teacher? I also wondered what Ada actually did all day, with Grandmother and Aunt Meggie taking care of all of the housework, given that the family was in such genteel poverty (emphasized many times). I was surprised by the equanimity with which Grandmother and Father treated Ada's unplanned pregnancy, though she and Ralph did marry. (And no more children?)

I can imagine the entire book as a 1930's movie in silvery black-and-white.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not an exciting book, but it is good. I'm not sure this book if debuting today would make the bestseller cut. It isn't lightening speed suspenseful, but rather Ellen Glasgow's prose is so melodic in rhythm, that the reader doesn't mind lingering quietly on the scenery, the atmosphere of its setting to see what will happen. It is also rather depressing actually, but of course such was the time, The Great Depression. Even though it wasn't fast paced, it wasn't predictable either. I call that skilled writing.

Just like listening to sad romantic music proves to be cathartic when being in a sad mood, so was this reading for me. Why would I want to listen to a song that makes me cry over and over again? I don't know...in a weird way, it makes me feel better. I felt connected to Ada Fincastle in this story. A strength of iron ran strong in her bloodline.

Another significant point for this book: Her writing is similar to John Steinbeck. Why isn't Glasgow more well-known? Is it because she was a woman?

[Gina · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/2 stars

I really enjoyed this book which takes place about one hundred years ago. There are similarities to our present day pandemic and its overtones of fear, poverty and economic uncertainty that eerily ring true today as we look at what is happening in the world around us. Ada is a wonderful woman who faces her world head on and wrings what happiness she can from it, even through the bleakest times. Her brilliant philosopher father goes mostly unknown after writing his volumes and then standing in the breadlines.
This is one of the few books written by a female author on Bloom’s Western Canon and I appreciated its inclusion because it seemed to effortlessly bring to life the culture of its time and place in history.

[Lindsey · Rating 2 out of 5]

I agree with my edition’s afterward that while this book has merit as a reflection of its time, it’s really not great. Glasgow thought very highly of herself, sought to be the American Tolstoy, and was very proud of this book in particular. However the plot is unoriginal and she romanticizes the past and rural life. There’s a definite “Kids these days! Society is going to hell in a handbasket!” vibe. This was written in the 30s so you can expect some issues with race and sex, but it’s still pretty cringe. There are some good moments when our main character is young and reflecting on the fleeting nature of happiness. I still think of “Barren Ground” fondly but will retire from Glasgow for good I think.

[Robin · Rating 4 out of 5]

It has been too long since I've read an Ellen Glasgow novel and I can see why the author though that Vein of Iron was her best work. Beautifully written this novel of four generation of strong women in one Southern family is a major work by a major writer. Unfortunately Ellen Glasgow seems to be fading into obscurity. None of her books seem to be in print anymore which is tragic. My all time favorite of hers though is still Barren Ground. I'd like to see publishing houses bring this talented writers works back into print.

[Amanda Masters · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this a lot. For me, "southern realism" can be hit-or-miss (Faulkner, I'm looking at you) so I didn't know what to expect, but the titular "vein of iron" carries this family narrative. The metaphor is well-done and relevant; the women of the family form the framework by which the family survives.

The characters and descriptions were vivid. This story reminded me somewhat (again) of Little House books, but for grownups.

This was on Book of the Month Club's list of what would be in a Well-Stocked Bookcase. (Listed in alphabetical order by title... progress is being made!)

[Kim W · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hard to rate. It’s a compelling story that describes sheer desperation but also beauty, glory and human fortitude.

I confess to skimming some of the more effusive pages and pages about flowers and scenery. The writing is rich but like eating too much chocolate.

The protagonist is heroic. “You just persevere”. I heard someone say that on the radio once when giving advice about how to maintain a marriage. It made me laugh but it is the truth. Nor more, no less.

[Kathy Theado · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty good book. The language was a little hard to deal with but it was written 80 years ago so of course some language is no longer correct to use. I wouldn't identify Ada as the strong woman character in this book, her Aunt Meggie and Grandmother were strong women.

[Milt · Rating 5 out of 5]

DBG for Jan. veins of irony, irons of vainty, parallels of parlay. taken back to times. thus twas ever.

[britneyreads · Rating 4 out of 5]

this is the first book I finished for grad school! Full review to come!

[oldgradstudent · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant. Glasgow's Depression era novel provides harrowing realism. A difficult and rewarding tale of a family struggling to survive a world crumbling around them.

[wally · Rating 3 out of 5]

reflects life during the big d, the depression. the wanton lifestyle of some....the unity of the fincastle family during the 30s, a unity that helped them endure the big d, the big depression...


an old couple commits suicide...it's the journey, remember? bertie who went in search of hope/work...

flappers and the youth who live recklessly, janet, the boys who liked to get drunk

and so on.

also...stresses the importance of mother earth, say true, boy howdy...

the fincastle family is presented within the setting of the land....the first fincastle had been inspired to find a place of happiness...."he was pursuing the dream of a free country, the dream of a country so vast that each man would have room to bury his dead on his own land."

the land's expanse means freedom for the endless seeking of the westward thrust of the pioneer....probably somethings something went that line went down...

the fincastles put down roots and they have a"unity of the house"....

john "looked out on god's mountain....felt the external world would break up and dissolve."


there is the disharmony of men, alongside all this peace and plenty....ralph says, "it is easy to be noble in the woods, but among other people, it makes you a kill-joy." p129 my copy.

man's morals and ideals disrupt the balance and ralph was forced to marry janet...but for ada, "something stronger than joy, the vein of iron...could not yield, could not bend, could not be broken."

the wrath of god...the law of the tribe...

the family leaves ironside, but returns... they had built upon rock...yea, verily.

this is a good story.

[Ashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another one of my favorite novels by Ellen Glasgow, this one takes place partly in the rural mountains of Virginia near Roanoke and partly in the fictionalized version of Richmond, called Queensborough. Vein of Iron includes Glasgow's most detailed critiques of religion through the character of John Fincastle, an itinerant Presbyterian minister whose theological views are too philosophically radical for American congregations. The novel follows his experiences in part, but it is mostly centered around his daughter, Ada Fincastle. Ada's romantic interest is forced by her father to marry another young woman in their town who falsely accuses him of impropriety. Her reputation is such that she soon desires to leave Ralph after meeting someone else during their marriage. Ada, having realized that so many of their social rules are needless and harmful and artificial, runs away with Ralph for a weekend before he has to go serve in WWI. She proudly bears a child out of wedlock, works her fingers to the bone after moving her family, including aunt and father, to Queenborough, where she can support them, and eventually becomes the caretaker for Ralph when he returns from the war emotionally damaged and has a car wreck in suspect circumstances. Ada Fincastle quite elegantly reveals her vein of iron throughout her upholding of the family in every kind of circumstance, in spite of age and gender.

[Tom Leland · Rating 4 out of 5]

"In that noonday of a planned tomorrow, when science has bared the last mysteries of the human entrails, and the closed cells of spontaneous generation are opened in public view -- in that morning brightness of knowledge will men have found a better world than human nature provides?"

Winner of the Pulitzer for a book written after this one, this book was second best-selling fiction book of 1935. Glasgow considered herself to be the first person in Virginia to say a word in favor of woman suffrage.

Her stated theme of this book: "What is the vein of iron that has enabled not only families, but races, nations, strains to survive and even to forge (or weave) some continuing traditions?"

In this book the vein of iron is this Scottish strain of fortitude…

This book is filled with important thinking about the meaning of life and death, and you know you're in the hands of a large mind, yet I wouldn't say the story itself was quite compelling enough to make it a standard classic work of literature -- maybe that's why no one today has heard of it, or her.

[Caitmarie24 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is lovely. I picked it for my 2015 Reading Challenge for the "book you chose for the cover" entry. And I did. It's a small, squarish book, with a cover from the 1960s re-issue. Just green and gold. It was written in 1935, though, and I loved reading about Ada Fincastle McBride and the "vein of iron" that runs through the women in her family as they deal with the Civil War, and then the Great War and the Great Depression. Her family never has much but they make do with what they can and they find happiness in just being together. It's quite rebellious a story, though, with several plot threads that buck the traditions of that age. Well worth reading.

[Jen Well-Steered · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh, man, this gets pretty depressing as you watch the Fincastle clan go from rural poverty before WWI to possibly lower middle class in the 1920s boom years to ever more desperate urban poverty, until the very last page, when hope arrives. And yet, this is how the depression was: banks closing with all of your money inside and no depositors' insurance, businesses cutting your hours and your pay until they finally had to close their doors, people riding trains around the country looking for work. Those who want to destroy the welfare state that arose in response to those circumstances are well-advised to read this book before casting their ballots.

[Rita · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyable to become acquainted with a whole family, living in an Allegheny farming village and then in Richmond, where they experienced the stock market crash of '29 and the depression. The strong women each have their own strengths.
Publ. 1935.
I don't seem to have a copy of this one. I do of the others.

[Beth · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. For my money/time, Ellen Glasgow is an under-rated American author. She depicts strong women in times when women were just discovering that they be independent. This is a maybe not heavy, classic literature, but a lovely family tale of life in the late 18th/early 19th century. I will definitely be adding Ellen Glasgow to my list of authors to read.

[Patti · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked up this book because there was a large section of Glasgow in the University's fiction area and I had never heard of her. Set in turn of the century Virginia, I often thought of the similar timeline to Downton Abbey set in a very different socio-economic environment.

[Patty Caudill · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is that one book that you pick up and reread again throughout the years. It's prose on every page that tells a heart wrenching story with such beauty it makes you swoon. I am enraptured by this book every time I read it.

[Vikki · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. A strong girl is in love with her childhood sweetheart. A wicked girl says she is pregnant and he marries her. This took place in 1935.

[Greta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tough times are described well in Ellen Glasgows' story of the 20s & 30s in the Valley of Virginia. Friendly to a womans' experience and perspective,thus uncommonly good.

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

The vein of iron in the women of a Virginia family 1901-1935 keeps the family going through many changes.

[Dianne Oliver · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a voice decidedly more female than Steinbeck, and less stark, this book tackles the Great Depression, but also sets up a contrast between romanticism and realism, religion and secularism, city and country village life, and how it plays out in old age. (the need for a return to the womb that seems universal). Torn between 3-4 stars as I found it interesting despite the fact that it unfolds in a slow, old style way. She does have good insight into people, the mountain ways, and, for me, I found the area history (Richmond, Roanoke area) and the commentary on religion (predestination/ Calvinism) to be of added interest, so I bumped her to a hesitant 4.