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The Sheltered Life
" The Sheltered Life ," writes Carol S. Manning in her Afterword to this new paperback edition, is "a jewel of American literature and deserves recognition as a masterpiece of the Southern Renaissance." It is a remarkably unsentimental look at the old South, a society that blindly holds to past values enforced by a strict code of conduct, being overtaken by the new age of industrialization. Ellen Glasgow's career-long attempt to expose the cruelty of the "cult of beauty worship" and the "philosophy of evasive idealism" that she saw as prevalent in the South's conversations, manners, customs, and literature reaches its zenith in The Sheltered Life .
329 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1932
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445 people want to read
About the author
Ellen Glasgow
174 books70 followersAmerican 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).
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).
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March 6, 2022
Shelter is nowhere to be found in The Sheltered Life. Ellen Glasgow’s grimly realistic 1932 novel chronicles the slow-motion tragedy that enfolds the lives of two once-genteel families in a fictionalized 20th-century Richmond. With surgical precision, the great Virginia novelist anatomizes the way in which a society that is fixated upon externals like manners and decorum can tolerate and even foster an inward corruption that destroys the spirit.
Glasgow is often regarded as either a forerunner or an early example of the Southern Literary Renaissance – the emergence, in the early to mid-20th century, of a profusion of great writers from the American South who combined fine observation of regional detail with trenchant social criticism, psychologically astute characterizations, and universal, even mythic, themes.
Born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, Glasgow early learned to question many of the unspoken values of life in her home city – the oppressive racial norms, the subjugation of women (Glasgow’s right to vote was not recognized until she was 47 years old), the sentimentalizing of the Confederacy that had had its capital at Richmond, and the cult of manners that so often left so many difficult truths unspoken.
The Sheltered Life is perhaps Glasgow’s most direct attack upon that Southern cult of manners. Set in the early 20th century – beginning in 1906, and continuing to the onset of the First World War in 1914 – this novel takes as its subject the changing fortunes of two families, the Archbalds and the Birdsongs, who live in a rapidly industrializing area on a once-select street of Queenborough, Virginia (Glasgow’s fictionalized Richmond).
The chemical factory at the end of the street often sends up an unpleasant smell: but as the novel’s narrator explains, “The Birdsongs stayed because, as they confessed proudly, they were too poor to move”; their neighbors, the Archbalds, stay because the aging family patriarch, General Archbald, “in his seventy-sixth year but still incapable of retreat, declared that he would never forsake Mrs. Birdsong. Industrialism might conquer, but they would never surrender” (p. 5). With just such fineness of detail, resonantly symbolic of a post-Civil War South that is still resistant to change, Glasgow begins what might be termed a tragedy of manners.
Just as William Blake titled one of his poetic collections Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789), so Glasgow seems to have liked setting up a counterpoint between the perspectives of a younger, more innocent character and an older, more experienced one. In the case of The Sheltered Life, the perspective of youth is provided by Jenny Blair Archbald, who goes from age 9 to 17 over the course of the novel; the perspective of age is conveyed through her grandfather, General Archbald, an aging Civil War veteran who is forever viewing the early-20th-century New South scene in terms of the dramatic changes that he has witnessed over the course of his life.
With his retirement from a successful postwar legal practice, General Archbald has ample time in which to observe the Archbald’s neighbors, the Birdsongs – like the Archbalds, former members of their community’s upper class who have fallen on hard times. Wife Eva, “in her prime, before misfortune had sapped her ardent vitality, would have put to shame all the professional beauties of Paris or London” (p. 100); she was the reigning belle of Queenborough. Unfortunately, Eva did not follow the unspoken rule for belles of her community and secure a good marriage to the wealthiest of her suitors; rather, she married the handsomest of her suitors, George Birdsong.
And George is a man with what Richmonders of Glasgow’s time might have delicately referred to as “personal issues.” While his legal practice has never really taken off, and he’s never really even worked terribly hard at the law, he’s a likable fellow: General Archbald describes George as a man of “full-bodied virtue” and “humanity”, a man who is easy to like. Yet therein lies the trouble: George Birdsong, “with his thick wind-blown hair, his smiling eyes, his look of virile hardness, of inexhaustible energy” (p. 101), is still the handsomest and most charming man in Queenborough; women are drawn to him, and he is not inclined to discourage their attentions.
Eva knows this truth about George; yet in Queenborough’s manners-oriented culture, where talking about what is really going on is considered terribly impolite, she is able (usually) to pretend that she doesn’t know. And the reader develops, early in the novel, a strong sense of foreboding, a feeling that this situation cannot end well.
The reader is introduced, with 9-year-old Jenny Blair, to George’s philandering ways in a chapter when Jenny Blair gets rebellious and goes roller skating down at the lower end of Canal Street, in a neighborhood that is fast becoming disreputable. Injured in a fall at that end of the street, Jenny Blair is taken into the home of Memoria, an African American woman who takes in washing for the Birdsongs. George is there, too, and is quick to secure from Jenny Blair a just-between-us promise that she won’t tell anyone about seeing George at Memoria’s home:
“I feel…that you can be trusted,” Mr. Birdsong continued earnestly, pronouncing each syllable very slowly and distinctly, as if he were trying to impress its importance upon her mind. “I feel that we would never, never give each other away.”
“Oh, never, never!”
“Nothing could make us tell, for instance, about this afternoon.”
“Nothing. Not – not wild horses.”
“Even after you’re grown up, we’ll still have our secret.”
“Always. Nobody shall ever know. Even if I live to be a – a thousand, I’ll never tell anybody.”
“Well, that’s what I call loyal,” he answered, and the strain seemed to relax in his voice. “You’re a friend worth having, and no man has too many of them at my age.” (p. 49)
Eva Birdsong eventually undergoes a physical health crisis that counterpoints the emotional crises that she has regularly undergone when evidence of George’s philandering has proven impossible to ignore; and a section of the book titled “The Illusion” brings those elements of the novel to the fore. Ill with some sort of trouble that goes unspoken by the characters – the implication seems to be that she is going to need a hysterectomy – Eva replies to a nurse’s assurances that everything is going to be alright by saying, “I hear, but there are times when I am worn out with hoping. I’ve hoped too much in my life” (pp. 150-51).
General Archbald meanwhile has a conversation with a young and reform-minded physician, Dr. John Welch, that shows the differing perspectives of different generations in this New South community. Welch is angry at the mental anguish that he sees Eva Birdsong suffering: “All the conditions of her life are unnatural. I honestly believe…that she has never drawn a natural breath since she was married. If she dies…it will be the long pretense of her life that has killed her.” General Archbald, who comes from that Victorian generation that fought the Civil War, replies, “I understand that better than you can. We were brought up that way. It was part of the code” (p. 153).
In the latter part of the novel, with its 1914 setting, and the First World War breaking out in Europe, long-simmering conflicts are also breaking out in Queenborough, Virginia. Jenny Blair is 17 years old now, and her feelings toward the ever-charming George Birdsong have blossomed into a genuine crush that had its beginnings in the secret that they shared at Memoria’s house. John Welch, the perceptive young doctor, senses what may be going on in Jenny Blair’s mind, and says to her, “I know you better than you think! You are like every other young girl who has grown up without coming in touch with the world. You are so bottled up inside that your imagination has turned into a hothouse for sensation” (p. 250).
John Welch even tries to warn Jenny Blair about her feelings for George Birdsong:
They had stopped before her gate, and he was looking down on her with a troubled expression. “You will be careful, won’t you, Jenny Blair?”
“Careful?”
“I mean about everything, now that Cousin Eva is ill.” Then he frowned. “It may be just my imagination, but – oh, well, you know why I am speaking.”
“No, I don’t, and I don’t want to! I don’t care what you say about anybody.” (p. 251)
John’s good advice goes unheeded; and between, on the one hand, Jenny Blair’s first full-fledged teenage crush, and, on the other hand, George Birdsong’s tendency to be drawn toward any young woman who is drawn toward him, the stage is set for a tragic resolution – one that Glasgow uses to show how strong is the tendency, among the Richmonders and Virginians of her time, to close ranks around people of their own social status, no matter the ethical facts of a case.
In an afterword to this University Press of Virginia edition of The Sheltered Life, Carol Manning, of Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, writes perceptively that Glasgow in this novel “portrays the remnants of the Old South as a society that has become stagnant and ingrown – a society that blindly holds to past ideals and past rules of conduct while the future knocks at the door” (p. 300). Professor Manning’s insight provides a suitable way to conclude this look at The Sheltered Life – a singularly powerful look at the tragic consequences that can befall a society where the need to be “proper” becomes an all-encompassing social imperative.
Glasgow is often regarded as either a forerunner or an early example of the Southern Literary Renaissance – the emergence, in the early to mid-20th century, of a profusion of great writers from the American South who combined fine observation of regional detail with trenchant social criticism, psychologically astute characterizations, and universal, even mythic, themes.
Born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, Glasgow early learned to question many of the unspoken values of life in her home city – the oppressive racial norms, the subjugation of women (Glasgow’s right to vote was not recognized until she was 47 years old), the sentimentalizing of the Confederacy that had had its capital at Richmond, and the cult of manners that so often left so many difficult truths unspoken.
The Sheltered Life is perhaps Glasgow’s most direct attack upon that Southern cult of manners. Set in the early 20th century – beginning in 1906, and continuing to the onset of the First World War in 1914 – this novel takes as its subject the changing fortunes of two families, the Archbalds and the Birdsongs, who live in a rapidly industrializing area on a once-select street of Queenborough, Virginia (Glasgow’s fictionalized Richmond).
The chemical factory at the end of the street often sends up an unpleasant smell: but as the novel’s narrator explains, “The Birdsongs stayed because, as they confessed proudly, they were too poor to move”; their neighbors, the Archbalds, stay because the aging family patriarch, General Archbald, “in his seventy-sixth year but still incapable of retreat, declared that he would never forsake Mrs. Birdsong. Industrialism might conquer, but they would never surrender” (p. 5). With just such fineness of detail, resonantly symbolic of a post-Civil War South that is still resistant to change, Glasgow begins what might be termed a tragedy of manners.
Just as William Blake titled one of his poetic collections Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789), so Glasgow seems to have liked setting up a counterpoint between the perspectives of a younger, more innocent character and an older, more experienced one. In the case of The Sheltered Life, the perspective of youth is provided by Jenny Blair Archbald, who goes from age 9 to 17 over the course of the novel; the perspective of age is conveyed through her grandfather, General Archbald, an aging Civil War veteran who is forever viewing the early-20th-century New South scene in terms of the dramatic changes that he has witnessed over the course of his life.
With his retirement from a successful postwar legal practice, General Archbald has ample time in which to observe the Archbald’s neighbors, the Birdsongs – like the Archbalds, former members of their community’s upper class who have fallen on hard times. Wife Eva, “in her prime, before misfortune had sapped her ardent vitality, would have put to shame all the professional beauties of Paris or London” (p. 100); she was the reigning belle of Queenborough. Unfortunately, Eva did not follow the unspoken rule for belles of her community and secure a good marriage to the wealthiest of her suitors; rather, she married the handsomest of her suitors, George Birdsong.
And George is a man with what Richmonders of Glasgow’s time might have delicately referred to as “personal issues.” While his legal practice has never really taken off, and he’s never really even worked terribly hard at the law, he’s a likable fellow: General Archbald describes George as a man of “full-bodied virtue” and “humanity”, a man who is easy to like. Yet therein lies the trouble: George Birdsong, “with his thick wind-blown hair, his smiling eyes, his look of virile hardness, of inexhaustible energy” (p. 101), is still the handsomest and most charming man in Queenborough; women are drawn to him, and he is not inclined to discourage their attentions.
Eva knows this truth about George; yet in Queenborough’s manners-oriented culture, where talking about what is really going on is considered terribly impolite, she is able (usually) to pretend that she doesn’t know. And the reader develops, early in the novel, a strong sense of foreboding, a feeling that this situation cannot end well.
The reader is introduced, with 9-year-old Jenny Blair, to George’s philandering ways in a chapter when Jenny Blair gets rebellious and goes roller skating down at the lower end of Canal Street, in a neighborhood that is fast becoming disreputable. Injured in a fall at that end of the street, Jenny Blair is taken into the home of Memoria, an African American woman who takes in washing for the Birdsongs. George is there, too, and is quick to secure from Jenny Blair a just-between-us promise that she won’t tell anyone about seeing George at Memoria’s home:
“I feel…that you can be trusted,” Mr. Birdsong continued earnestly, pronouncing each syllable very slowly and distinctly, as if he were trying to impress its importance upon her mind. “I feel that we would never, never give each other away.”
“Oh, never, never!”
“Nothing could make us tell, for instance, about this afternoon.”
“Nothing. Not – not wild horses.”
“Even after you’re grown up, we’ll still have our secret.”
“Always. Nobody shall ever know. Even if I live to be a – a thousand, I’ll never tell anybody.”
“Well, that’s what I call loyal,” he answered, and the strain seemed to relax in his voice. “You’re a friend worth having, and no man has too many of them at my age.” (p. 49)
Eva Birdsong eventually undergoes a physical health crisis that counterpoints the emotional crises that she has regularly undergone when evidence of George’s philandering has proven impossible to ignore; and a section of the book titled “The Illusion” brings those elements of the novel to the fore. Ill with some sort of trouble that goes unspoken by the characters – the implication seems to be that she is going to need a hysterectomy – Eva replies to a nurse’s assurances that everything is going to be alright by saying, “I hear, but there are times when I am worn out with hoping. I’ve hoped too much in my life” (pp. 150-51).
General Archbald meanwhile has a conversation with a young and reform-minded physician, Dr. John Welch, that shows the differing perspectives of different generations in this New South community. Welch is angry at the mental anguish that he sees Eva Birdsong suffering: “All the conditions of her life are unnatural. I honestly believe…that she has never drawn a natural breath since she was married. If she dies…it will be the long pretense of her life that has killed her.” General Archbald, who comes from that Victorian generation that fought the Civil War, replies, “I understand that better than you can. We were brought up that way. It was part of the code” (p. 153).
In the latter part of the novel, with its 1914 setting, and the First World War breaking out in Europe, long-simmering conflicts are also breaking out in Queenborough, Virginia. Jenny Blair is 17 years old now, and her feelings toward the ever-charming George Birdsong have blossomed into a genuine crush that had its beginnings in the secret that they shared at Memoria’s house. John Welch, the perceptive young doctor, senses what may be going on in Jenny Blair’s mind, and says to her, “I know you better than you think! You are like every other young girl who has grown up without coming in touch with the world. You are so bottled up inside that your imagination has turned into a hothouse for sensation” (p. 250).
John Welch even tries to warn Jenny Blair about her feelings for George Birdsong:
They had stopped before her gate, and he was looking down on her with a troubled expression. “You will be careful, won’t you, Jenny Blair?”
“Careful?”
“I mean about everything, now that Cousin Eva is ill.” Then he frowned. “It may be just my imagination, but – oh, well, you know why I am speaking.”
“No, I don’t, and I don’t want to! I don’t care what you say about anybody.” (p. 251)
John’s good advice goes unheeded; and between, on the one hand, Jenny Blair’s first full-fledged teenage crush, and, on the other hand, George Birdsong’s tendency to be drawn toward any young woman who is drawn toward him, the stage is set for a tragic resolution – one that Glasgow uses to show how strong is the tendency, among the Richmonders and Virginians of her time, to close ranks around people of their own social status, no matter the ethical facts of a case.
In an afterword to this University Press of Virginia edition of The Sheltered Life, Carol Manning, of Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, writes perceptively that Glasgow in this novel “portrays the remnants of the Old South as a society that has become stagnant and ingrown – a society that blindly holds to past ideals and past rules of conduct while the future knocks at the door” (p. 300). Professor Manning’s insight provides a suitable way to conclude this look at The Sheltered Life – a singularly powerful look at the tragic consequences that can befall a society where the need to be “proper” becomes an all-encompassing social imperative.
June 7, 2020
¡Estupenda¡ ¡Me ha gustado mucho! ¡No entiendo cómo no hay ninguna otra obra suya traducida al castellano¡
June 25, 2007
Great story [publ. 1932] portraying growing up in the Old South [Richmond, Virginia] before WW II. For a woman, why being beautiful was almost everything, and for everyone, how crucial keeping up appearances was, more important than anything else.
I like Glasgow's term for this kind of pretending, or insincerity: "evasive idealism".
Glasgow shows us how this works through the eyes of a 9 year old girl and her 79 year old grandfather. It explains a lot!
I like Glasgow's term for this kind of pretending, or insincerity: "evasive idealism".
Glasgow shows us how this works through the eyes of a 9 year old girl and her 79 year old grandfather. It explains a lot!
March 6, 2014
By the open French window of the dining-room Jenny Blair Archibald was reading Little Women for the assured reward of a penny a page.
haha - if the like of us here on GoodReads were paid one penny a page we'd all be in the pink wouldn't we. A couple of weeks ago I read Barren Ground by this author and loved it to a 4*, so I have great hopes for this, which is deemed by some quarters as her best.
haha - if the like of us here on GoodReads were paid one penny a page we'd all be in the pink wouldn't we. A couple of weeks ago I read Barren Ground by this author and loved it to a 4*, so I have great hopes for this, which is deemed by some quarters as her best.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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April 3, 2023So I live in Richmond, VA and it’s a weird town when it comes to dealing with its own past. On the one had, it’s the site of a lot of pre-Civil War colonial trade. Founded by William Byrd and named for a spot on the Thames, Richmond has a kind of desperately clung-to aristocracy that is just a pure fabrication (like every aristocracy, sure, but more like a copy of a copy). Ellen Glasgow is Richmond’s own chronicler of this kind of desperation. Richmond also claims Edgar Allen Poe, and like Poe, Glasgow is witness to the fractures around the edges of a society that presents one vision while containing a much different inside.
This novel traces some of this kind of story. It takes place in 1900-1918ish and represents a kind of caught-between element of the white, middle-class (in the British sense) world of society. Told through the eyes of Jenny Blair and her grandfather, General Archbald, this novel shows how sheltered a world-view can be when one is a girl-child who is not allowed to see the world of adults that will become her future, but also from the perspective of the older generation still clinging to a past fought-for but lost.
Of course this novel also deals with erasure. The erasure of Blackness in the South is a glaring kind of presence in this novel, written in 1932. And of course, it’s clear that Glasgow just didn’t seem particularly interested in their story, but I can now say I have read Richmond’s very own and it was, well, it was interesting conceptually, and I read the book quickly, but I think the worldview of the author has also faded along with that of its subjects.
This novel traces some of this kind of story. It takes place in 1900-1918ish and represents a kind of caught-between element of the white, middle-class (in the British sense) world of society. Told through the eyes of Jenny Blair and her grandfather, General Archbald, this novel shows how sheltered a world-view can be when one is a girl-child who is not allowed to see the world of adults that will become her future, but also from the perspective of the older generation still clinging to a past fought-for but lost.
Of course this novel also deals with erasure. The erasure of Blackness in the South is a glaring kind of presence in this novel, written in 1932. And of course, it’s clear that Glasgow just didn’t seem particularly interested in their story, but I can now say I have read Richmond’s very own and it was, well, it was interesting conceptually, and I read the book quickly, but I think the worldview of the author has also faded along with that of its subjects.
June 28, 2018
On publication in 1932 this was a best-seller and remained very popular for a decade. Despite a fascinating use of internal monologue by several very different characters, the story is deathly dull and contains only hints of better "muckraking" realist novels of the time. It is also wildly racist without intending to be so, and therefor has not aged well. It is a story that plays peek-a-boo with adultery, child molestation, miscegenation, southern sympathies at the height of Jim Crow and manages to get everything wrong except the desperation of undereducated faded middle class gentility in the pre WWI south in the voices of "sheltered" women contrasted with the "unsheltered" men and women shambling in the streets early in the Great Depression. As a novel it's dismal. As a view into the zeitgeist of the US white middle class of the early 30's it's very useful and surprising. Genteel ex-Confederate General reminisces about saving runaway slaves in the swamps. Shallow cad who likes killing things shocked at wife's reaction to his infidelities. Took me two months to read 247 pages. I can only recommend for those researching the period. The language is wrong, the dialect is clumsy and it is hard not to hear farce behind the verbiage.
October 22, 2011
My affection for this book grew the more that I read. Initially, prose had sounded flowery and stilted to me but gradually I became accustomed to Glasgow's style. I think that some of the main characters will remain in my memory and those memories will be poignant as the book ends in a tragic and shocking event and its repercussions for the 4 main characters are memorable.
February 2, 2015
One of Glasgow's best novels and the one I would have liked to have seen receive the Pulitzer. Steeped in irony, the novel follows a young Jenny Blair as she learns to see behind the subterfuge of the adults who are all pretending to different lives than the ones they lead. From Eva Birdsong, the beautiful operatic singer who left her career for romance only to find herself married to a womanizer who carries on a lengthy affair with one of the "mulatto" women who works for the families in their social circle to Jenny Blair's grandfather who gave up the love of his life to marry a woman he ended up accidentally stuck with in a carriage overnight in his youth, thus ruining her reputation if he didn't marry her, the novel shows how social constraints and expectations shape and restrict characters from living their authentic lives. When Jenny Blair attempts to play along, the novel comes to a dramatic conclusion and the final veil falls. Beautifully written.
September 1, 2012
I would have given this 3 1/2 stars. I liked the story but it could have used a better editor. It tended to repeat itself in fact or sometimes just in theme. Forty or so pages could have been trimmed off without affecting the story. I would compare in style to Edith Wharton. It is interesting that some of the details in this book parallel Glasgow's own life. Specifically, the description of Eva Birdsong is the same as that made by the author of her mother.
August 9, 2007
I probably should have found this more interesting than I did, considering it's set in Richmond, but I had a very difficult time getting into this book. It had all the plot elements of a "juicy" story, but the writing failed to engage.
May 9, 2023
Jenny Blair Archbald lives with her widowed mother, her two aunts, and her grandfather in a once-fashionable neighborhood of Queensborough (Richmond), Virginia. When the novel opens Jenny Blair is a bright, happy nine-year-old. She dotes on her grandfather. She loves the next-door neighbors George and Eva Birdsong, a childless couple whose fortunes have waxed and waned. Eva was a great beauty; George is an unsuccessful businessman and an unfaithful husband.
As Jenny Blair grows up she develops a massive crush (as we'd call it now) on George Birdsong, but she also adores the long-suffering Eva. She fails to see the contradiction. The General, her grandfather, also loves Eva as the replacement for the great, lost love of his youth. (He married whom he did out of his sense of duty.) Passions repressed and expressed. Love unrequited and returned. Secrets revealed and hidden.
The afterword by Carol S. Manning was helpful to my understanding and eventual appreciation of Glasgow's 1932 novel. What was most annoying to my 21st-century sensibilities was that Jenny Blair did NOTHING. Her coming-out was on the horizon but in the meantime what occupied her days? I realize the point of the bildungsroman (which this is) is that Jenny Blair grew from naivete to maturity (well, almost) with challenges and trials -- but in her case, she remained supremely selfish and unempathetic.
As Jenny Blair grows up she develops a massive crush (as we'd call it now) on George Birdsong, but she also adores the long-suffering Eva. She fails to see the contradiction. The General, her grandfather, also loves Eva as the replacement for the great, lost love of his youth. (He married whom he did out of his sense of duty.) Passions repressed and expressed. Love unrequited and returned. Secrets revealed and hidden.
The afterword by Carol S. Manning was helpful to my understanding and eventual appreciation of Glasgow's 1932 novel. What was most annoying to my 21st-century sensibilities was that Jenny Blair did NOTHING. Her coming-out was on the horizon but in the meantime what occupied her days? I realize the point of the bildungsroman (which this is) is that Jenny Blair grew from naivete to maturity (well, almost) with challenges and trials -- but in her case, she remained supremely selfish and unempathetic.
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January 25, 2020A novel of life in a small southern town around 1917-18. The zeitgeist is so different. Told from the standdpoint of an eighty-something year old man and a 17 year old girl, the world views of the two clash. And both views clash progfoundly with today's world. But there are similarities. Both characters seem to believe that beauty is the most desired characteristic of womanhood. No one understands what they are really are talking about. Every character is confused by the expectations of the world that they live in.
Much of the musings of the old man become boring as he tries to make sense of his own life and the young girl's teenage emotional state at finding herself in love with a family friend, a man old enogh to be her father and a friend of her grandfather's, are overdone to say the least. Ellen Glasgow was a well respected author. I plan to read another of her books to compare.
Much of the musings of the old man become boring as he tries to make sense of his own life and the young girl's teenage emotional state at finding herself in love with a family friend, a man old enogh to be her father and a friend of her grandfather's, are overdone to say the least. Ellen Glasgow was a well respected author. I plan to read another of her books to compare.
March 20, 2023
Sadly sadly forgotten author. Glasgow is like Faulkner if he was different in every way (but seriously—I would’ve thought a Victorian Faulkner was a contradiction in terms and yet here we are. I find it hard to believe that Glasgow hadn’t read Light In August before writing this but the two books came out the same year; very interesting).
April 12, 2021
The ending was...... WOW! I'm officially a Glasgow fan & already have 5 of her other novels on my "to read" list. Unfortunately, her books are widely out of print & hard to find except in obscure/online book stores.
March 22, 2023
Grad school read: Kate Chopin vibes.
June 1, 2023
Just didn’t like the book…
October 16, 2023
3,5 🌟
January 3, 2026
A smart, engaging, and thoroughly near perfect novel of manners. No spoilers but a wonderful conclusion.
February 22, 2025
Parts of this tale of the Lost Cause were interesting, but this novel just did not resonate with me,even as my theme for this calendar year is women authors.
December 26, 2013
This reads like a YA novel with an existential undertone. Glasgow takes her theme about the destructiveness of social conventions that require people to do their duty and keep up appearances, and she beats the reader over the head with it.
The book is divided into three parts, and the middle part is more of a prose piece in which the aging General Archbald reflects on a missed chance that could have led to happiness, if propriety hadn't got in the way. This is a lovely little detour from the suffocating plot of the novel. "In each hour, when he had lived it, life had seemed important to him; but now he saw it was composed of things that were all little things in themselves, of mere fractions of time, of activities so insignificant that they had passed away with the moment in which they had quivered and vanished."
The book is divided into three parts, and the middle part is more of a prose piece in which the aging General Archbald reflects on a missed chance that could have led to happiness, if propriety hadn't got in the way. This is a lovely little detour from the suffocating plot of the novel. "In each hour, when he had lived it, life had seemed important to him; but now he saw it was composed of things that were all little things in themselves, of mere fractions of time, of activities so insignificant that they had passed away with the moment in which they had quivered and vanished."
Want to read
August 11, 2015I really want to try her out and this sort of sounds like the one that might most easily strike my fancy, though
Virginia
is the one on the 500 women list, and
In This Our Life
is the Pulitzer winner. Curious. Like some kind of Wharton-Faulkner mashup sounding sort of thing.
April 22, 2009
Makes you realize no one is truly "sheltered" from life or from themselves.
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