Barren Ground: A Southern Literary Classic of an Independent Woman Defining Herself in Rural Virginia

by Ellen Glasgow

Barren Ground is a 1925 novel by Ellen Glasgow giving an account of 30 years in the life of a woman in rural Virginia: Dorinda Oakley is an intelligent, independent and vibrant young lady who is trying find herself and her purpose in life by moving to New York after a love disillusion.

Dorinda Oakley, daughter of a land‐poor farmer in Virginia, at 20 goes to work in Nathan Pedlar's store. She falls in love with Jason Greylock, weak‐willed son of the village doctor, and forgets her purpose of helping her father to rebuild the farm, but soon before their planned wedding Jason is forced to marry a former fiancée. Bitterly disillusioned and pregnant, Dorinda seeks work in New York City, where she is injured and miscarries in a street accident. She is attended by Dr. Faraday, who later employs her as a nurse for his children. A young doctor proposes to her, but she refuses him, determined to "find something else in life."

After her father's death, Dorinda returns to the family farm, which is impoverished and overgrown with broomsedge. Having studied scientific agriculture in New York, she introduces progressive methods, gradually returning the "barren ground" to fertility and creating a prosperous dairy farm. Her mother becomes an invalid after her brother Rufus is questioned for murder, and Dorinda only can rely on the aid of a few farm laborers. After her mother's death, she marries Nathan Pedlar to provide a home for his children, and after he dies, she shelters Jason, now penniless and ill from excessive drinking. He soon dies.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Southern, Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, American, 20th Century

540 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1925

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

[Tim Null · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ellen Glasgow's novel Barren Ground begins with an omniscient third person point of view that can see and tell all, but the novel ends with a third person point of view that can only see and comprehend what the main character, Dorinda Oakley, can see and comprehend. Therefore, some things that were understood at the beginning are forgotten or misunderstood by the end. For example, at the beginning, it's understood that the land and the people living on it can only be saved by a huge investment in both. An investment of time, effort, and money. By the end of the novel Dorinda Oakley appears to have forgotten the investment and sacrifice others have made in her behalf, and she talks as though she believes that her success has been achieved only by her own strength of character and hard work. There is one glaring contradiction to this when she is charitable to the one person least deserving of her charity.

At the time Glasgow wrote this novel, America was enamored by the philosophy called 'rugged individualism'. It's my hope that Barren Ground was an intentional repudiation of that philosophy rather than a sloppy effort to defend it.

Near the end, Dorinda Oakley says, "Put your heart in the land. The land is the only thing that will stay by you." When asked if she will remarry, she replies, "I've finished with all that."

While reading Barren Ground, one might occasionally wonder if Glasgow is a racist or if she is merely showing us what racism looks like. Personally, I hope it's the latter.

Dorinda Oakley is probably Glasgow's most autobiographical character in terms of interpersonal relationships. Glasgow had several long-term relationships with men but never married. She also had a live-in secretary-nurse-housekeeper named Anne Virginia Bennett who lived with her for years. The Fluvanna character in Barren Ground and her relationship with Dorinda Oakley reminds one of Glasgow and her relationship with Bennett. Dorinda Oakley's distaste for sexual relationships makes one wonder if that reflected Glasgow's personal views. Glasgow's excessive use of the words queer and gay makes one wonder if that's just a weird coincidence.

I wouldn't discourage anyone from reading Glasgow, but I'm not really comfortable encouraging people either. However, historical fiction is popular right now, so why not consider fiction that's historical? Remember that Glasgow begins with a long description of the place, and then she focuses on the people. There's just a smidgen of plot. Just enough plot to keep things moving. Not too unlike a leaf floating in a summer breeze.

Karen wondered why I chose to reread Barren Ground at this moment in time. It was in response to Sutah's comment that he wished he had read Barren Ground when he was a teen. It made me curious about what I had forgotten.

At some point in time, I hope to
Reread The Sheltered Life
Finish reading Virginia
Read In This Our Life
Read Vein of Iron

Finished reread
at 2:14 PM PST on 30 May 2023

****************************************

STARTED REREADING
at 10:18 AM PST on May 24, 2023

####
Read this back in the day. Let's guess 1976. Man I loved it. Don't know why I loved it. Don't even know why I would have bought it. (Maybe it was the cover. Maybe it was the title. Maybe it was because Glasgow was a famous Virginia author and I was living in Virginia at the time.)

I read it and became a big Glasgow fan. Read several of her books. Own several first editions too. None of this makes any sense to me now.

I don't remember anything about any of the Glasgow books I've read. A couple years ago I did try to read a Glasgow book titled Virginia. I managed a little more than one chapter before I quit. Perhaps I should go back to the beginning and reread Barren Ground.

[ALLEN · Rating 4 out of 5]

If not for a quirk of local politics, it is unlikely that we fifteen-year-olds in Mrs. Riddle's high-school lit class would have been exposed to Ellen Glasgow's novel BARREN GROUND. Published in 1925 but set a few years earlier, the novel relates the life of Dorinda Oakley, a poorish young woman from a traditionally poor region of Virginia, the Southside. Having lost her fickle fiance to a wealthier woman, Dorinda moves to New York City in order to make something of herself. This she eventually does, but the price is high. All this is told in a naturalistic style that does not omit the protagonist's own passion.

I could mention the extreme reaction that Dorinda has upon hearing her first symphony concert, but can't go into details here lest I introduce a spoiler. Suffice it to say that it was something even today's fifteen-year-olds might want to be kept from, but Ellen Glasgow was a Virginian, as were we, so politics trumped "good taste" and in this case, I was pleased. Given the resurgence of American women's literature over the past thirty years, BARREN GROUND has come back into its own, and that's good too, I think. It should be read.

In my opinion BARREN GROUND is under-read, and under-appreciated.

[Bree (AnotherLookBook) · Rating 4 out of 5]

A novel about a woman in turn-of-the-century Virginia who, after being jilted by her neighbor, must discover another means of making her life a success. 1925.

Full review (and other recommendations!) at Another look book

A wonderful read by an author who I'd never heard of until I found an entire shelf of her books in a local library. Beautiful writing to complement the kind of story you continue munching on long after you've closed the book. Not very light, but not too heavy either--just interesting and, at times, quite profound. If you enjoy reading rural stories of yesteryear featuring female protagonists (think Hardy, but American), or if you're interested in Virginian history, or just life in a small farming community around the turn of the 20th century, I think you'll eat this book up as wholeheartedly as I did.

[Cititoare Calatoare · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dorinda se confrunta cu provocarile vietii rurale din Virginia la inceputul secolului XX, unde lupta pentru supravietuire si emancipare intr-o societate dominata de traditii si constrangeri sociale este tare grea.
Este o carte superba pe care o sa o adorati cu siguranta de la primele pagini.

Gasiti recenzia completa pe pagina mea de instagram @reading_on_my_way

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Free download available at Project Gutenberg

I made the proofing this book for Free Literature and Project Gutenberg will publish it.

Opening lines:
A girl in an orange-coloured shawl stood at the window of Pedlar's store
and looked, through the falling snow, at the deserted road. Though she
watched there without moving, her attitude, in its stillness, gave an
impression of arrested flight, as if she were running toward life.

4* Barren Ground
4* The Shadowy Third
2* The Deliverance
TR The Battle Ground
TR One Man In His Time
TR Virginia
TR The Wheel of Life
TR In This Our Life

[Charles Michael Fischer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have changed my mind on this novel. At first, I thought it was a little too deterministic and overwrought...then I realized it's brilliant how Glasgow critiques a chauvinistic economic system. The common arguments about the problematic loss or sacrifice of Dorinda's sexuality (or sexual desire) seem to miss the mark and Glasgow's ironic intent. Also, while some argue that "Barren Ground" is on board with Allen Tate and the Agrarians, I'm not sure I see the relationship existing so smoothly: Glasgow seems to critique and thus complicate both sides of the Agrarian v. Industry debate.

"Barren Ground" should be on more college syllabi.

[Lindsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

An ambitious (if overwrought) philosophical novel that asks the big question, How should we live our lives? We watch Dorinda Oakley embrace love and hope, then fall into existential despair, and then embrace a stoic and unforgiving life of hardship, only to have a big realization in the final three pages.

I imagine a lot of people would find this book intolerable: the constant philosophizing, the melodramatic voice, the repetition of themes, the heavy use of metaphor! But I thought it was lovely.

Reading some critical analysis of this novel, it seems there is a lot of disagreement over what Glasglow is trying to say. Is she a bitter, cynical woman who agrees with Dorinda's choice to shut herself off from love and affection? Did she think Southern economy forced a woman to choose between independence or love? Or is this book a sad and ironic look about the danger of putting dignity and the esteem of others above "happiness-hunting"? I think the latter.

Early in the book, when Dorinda falls in love with love, she has this realization: "All around her people were pretending that insignificant things were the only important things. The eternal gestures of milking and cooking, of sowing and reaping! ...all these persons whom she saw daily were engaged in this strange conspiracy of dissimulation. Not one of them had ever betrayed to her this hidden knowledge of life."

Then of course, she finds existential despair: "I'm dried up at the core, and yet, I've got to go on pretending that I'm alive, that I'm like other people." And next, her period of hard work and self-denial: "Hearts may be broken, men may live and die, but the cows must be milked!"

There are clues throughout, however, that the earliest realization may be the right one. And I think the fact that Glasglow was a Nietzsche fan negates the idea that she is celebrating materialism. Anyways, I'll definitely read more Glasglow.

[Wealhtheow]

Described to me as "Glasgow's books have often been described as provincial, being as they focus on characters and settings in the early 20thC South (usually Virginia, and frequently rural), but she's as sharp a critic of social mores as Edith Wharton. And while her racial attitudes are disquietingly reflective of the norm for that time and place, she was also an outspoken feminist and that also comes through...[Barren Ground] is about a young woman from a poor family who is seduced, impregnated, then jilted by a wealthy man, but rather than wallow in her misfortune she goes north to study advanced farming techniques, then comes back home and becomes the wealthiest person in her community."

Sounds like it's worth a shot!

[Bettie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A girl in an orange-coloured shawl stood at the window of Pedlar's store and looked, through the falling snow, at the deserted road.

Hard-hearted Hannah really does knock the frills off Scarlett O'Hara. brilliant.

NB - There is a small amount of mild racism in this story that one could feel uncomfortable with but please bear in mind the vicinity and the times.

[Joe Johnston · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this for a southern lit course in grad school. Uninspiring & tedious, with the discouraging theme of "life can be a drag--man up and tough it out." Feh.

[Toni Wyatt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I got this for free on Prime Day for my Kindle. I had never heard of it. It was written in 1925. This was a 2.5 star for me, rounded up to 3 here.

While the story itself had some interesting moments, there were a lot of editing issues (which one would think would have been resolved by now!), and it was also filled with racial bias that felt as if it were forced for the sake of publication. As the book takes place in Virginia, maybe that was the case, however, the work would have been 100 % better without it,

Dorinda grew up in a small town. She worked at the only local store and helped the owner care for his ailing wife and their children. She falls in love with a new doctor in town, and her life gets turned upside down.

I won’t say more, but plenty happens. Things that were surprising, and things quite disturbing.

[Jenny Yates · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is very much like reading Kate Chopin. The writing is beautiful, and there is a strong feminist slant. It’s deservedly a classic.

However, it was written by a Southern white woman in the 20s, and so naturally, racist assumptions are imbedded in this novel. The tricky thing is that, in its day, the novel would have been considered enlightened, because there are so many responsible, hard-working, reliable Black people in its pages, and the protagonist generally prefers working with them than working with the local white people, with a few exceptions. Still, there are a lot of blanket assumptions.

The central character of the novel is Dorinda Oakley, who lives in a small farming community in Virginia. The land is barren, the people mostly poor, and her father worked really hard his whole life, planting tobacco year after year, eking out a living. Most of his land was given over to broomsedge, the local tough weed – and the major metaphor in the novel - because he didn’t have enough money to hire workers. The characters are drawn beautifully, but the best writing is about the land itself.

Dorinda, a young woman with the novel begins, falls in love with Jason, the young doctor who has just arrived in town. He is just there temporarily to help his irascible drunkard of a father, who has fallen ill. But he is charming and seductive, and Dorinda falls for him, and they become engaged. Dorinda’s infatuation is described vividly, as is her disillusionment when Jason is coerced into following through on a previous courtship to a much richer woman. He is too cowardly even to tell Dorinda that he has married the other woman. Worse, Dorinda is pregnant.

Devastated and humiliated, Dorinda sneaks away on the early morning train without saying goodbye to anyone, and takes off for New York City. She has some hard weeks, wandering the streets and looking for a job, but through a fortunate accident, she finds one, makes friends, and even attracts an interested suitor. However, she’s decided that she’s through with love. She’ll never make that mistake again.

And she doesn’t. She’s a very strong woman, all her passion contained in the conviction that love is behind her. Instead, after two years in New York, she starts to think about starting a dairy farm back home, and when she gets word that her father has fallen ill, she goes back home and begins to work towards that end. She takes a loan (going against all her family training), buys cows, and starts using some new innovative farming techniques which reclaim the dead soil.

The novel follows her through the next thirty years, as her fortunes rise by dint of her hard work, persistence and resolute will. She even marries, but she marries a man who is kind and submissive, someone she doesn’t love, someone who doesn’t even ask to share her bed. Her old lover, meanwhile, goes through a lot of misfortunes, takes to drink, and ends up with his farm being sold off at a loss because he can’t pay his taxes. And Dorinda buys it, although she can’t explain why she even wants it. She turns it around into a paying enterprise, as well.

The novel ends when Jason ends up very sick, in the poorhouse, and Dorinda, again acting on a strange impulse, rescues him and installs him in a room in her house. There is no reconciliation between them, and his death doesn’t really affect her, although it does leave her with many unanswered questions about the choices we all face in life, and the fates we enact.

Some quotes:

This first passage describes the time in Dorinda’s life when she’s in love.

< Her ears were ringing as if she moved in a high wind. Sounds floated to her in thin strains, from so great a distance that she was obliged to have questions repeated before they reached her ears. And all the time, while she weighed chickens and counted eggs and tasted butter, she was aware that the faint, slow smile clung like an edge of light to her lips. >

This is a storm on the day that Dorinda discovers that her fiancé has married another woman.

< Suddenly, without nearer warning, the storm broke. A streak of white fire split the sky, and the tattered clouds darkened to an angry purple. The wind, which had been chained at a distance, tore itself free with a hurtling noise and crashed in gusts through the tree-tops. >

This is what the countryside looks like, on the early morning when Dorinda leaves town.

< The sun had risen through a drift of cloud, and beneath the violent rim an iridescent light rained over the abandoned fields. While they drove on, it seemed to Dorinda that it was like moving within the heart of an opal. Every young green leaf, every dew-drenched weed, every silken cobweb, every brilliant bird, or gauzy insect, - all these things were illuminated and bedizened with colour. Only the immense black shadow of the horse and buggy raced sombrely over the broomsedge by the roadside. >

Here, she’s been back at the farm for many years.

< At thirty-three, the perspective of the last ten years was incredibly shortened. All the cold starry mornings when she had awakened before day and crept out to the barn by lantern light to attend to the milking, appeared to her now as a solitary frozen dawn. All the bleak winters, all the scorching summers, were a single day; all the evenings, when she had dreamed half asleep in the firelit dusk, were a single night. She could not separate these years into seasons. In her long retrospect they were crystallized into one flawless pattern. >

There are some great descriptions of snow.

< Except for the lighted house at her back she might have been alone in a stainless world before the creation of life. A cold white moon was shedding a silver lustre over the landscape, which appeared as transparent as glass against the impenetrable horizon. >

< As they turned out of the gate, the wheels slid over the embedded rocks to the frozen ruts in the snow. Only a circle of road immediately in front of them was visible, and while the wagon rolled on, this spot of ground appeared to travel with them, never changing and never lingering in its passage. Into this illuminated circle tiny tracks of birds drifted and vanished like magic signs. >

This passage comes close to the end, as Jason lies dying.

< For an instant the memory of the Jason she had first known flickered over him like a vanishing ray of sunlight. As the gleam faded, she felt that he was passing with it into some unearthly medium where she could not follow. It was, she told herself, only the endless riddle of mortality, renewed again and yet again in each human being. >

[Jeff Koloze · Rating 4 out of 5]

Steven Spielberg would never film this novel since it features an unfulfilled feminist, so Mel Gibson will have to do it.

Pro-abortion feminists in this twenty-first century may think of Ellen Glasgow as just another dead white female writer, but pro-life feminists will delight in and learn much from this quasi-autobiographical and thorough narrative of Dorinda, a late nineteenth-century/early twentieth-century woman who thinks that her life is a failure.

Maybe it’s a failure because Dorinda has been restricted by Presbyterian Christianity and therefore beyond the two-millennia tradition of orthodox Catholic Christianity and all that the religion has to say about love, marriage, and sex.

Maybe Dorinda is an unfulfilled woman because she (or the author) confuses the terms “love”, “marriage”, and “sex” throughout the novel. These three terms seem to be used interchangeably when they obviously denote different things, as anybody steeped in Judaism and Christianity knows. Dorinda’s comments on love and sex lead to the conclusion that she would have benefited from understanding the Theology of the Body as discussed by St. John Paul II, especially since the characters are Protestant. Although the setting is decades before the saint first enunciated his ideas about the importance of sex and the human body, this claim is not anachronistic, of course, since Catholic Christianity has consistently taught that sex, instituted by the Creator, is so beautiful as the union of two bodies that it must be honored within marriage. Dorinda utterly fails to understand that.

In fact, the terms and phrases which Dorinda uses to refer to the triad of love, marriage, and sex demonstrate the unfortunate ambiguity of her Protestant Christian heritage, becoming more nominal as she progresses through the decades of the plot. Dorinda mentions the three terms in often obscured language, as when she talks about “this hidden knowledge of life” (27) or that she “became aware of her body” (63). This hesitancy cannot be attributed to authorial fear of not being published. After all, the novel was written in 1925, when Freud’s ideas about sex were emerging as popular topics; the author herself was as bold as most early feminists of that time were known to be.

Dorinda’s attitude toward life in general shows how pessimistic someone can become who distances him- or herself from the life-affirming Judeo-Christian ethos. Dorinda equates life with “barren ground” (196), and she thinks the "will to love” is a “destructive process” (233). It doesn’t help, either, that Dorinda was unwanted: “Dorinda and [her brother] Rufus both came while [their mother] was looking ahead, as she told herself, to a peaceful middle age unhampered by child-bearing” (39).

Closely related to sex, maybe Dorinda is such a lonely and unfulfilled character because she has a negative view of men. Even though she encountered some men who were faithful and loving, Dorinda (like a typical teenaged girl) cannot get over her “first love”, who is more a disgrace to the male gender than a possible husband and father of Dorinda’s child. This episode of fornication with a man who just wanted to get into her pants is the cause of her enduring negative views on men. While asserting that she could live without any man is innocuous enough (106), agreeing with her mother in being secretive with men (124) and saying that “No good had ever come […] of putting questions to a man” (318) illustrate her inability to work with the male half of humanity—a fatal flaw in a person who should be a fully-developed feminist.

Overall, Glasgow paints a depressing portrait of an aging feminist, but it is a portrait which can not only educate us in the twenty-first century, but also force us to support traditional sexual norms in a twenty-first century culture which accepts the leftist idiocy of a distorted gender ideology and the mental illness of transgenderism as alternative lifestyles. While Dorinda hopes for “something in life besides love” (198), contemporary readers must counter that love is the essence of life. While Dorinda reduces love, marriage, and sex with the demeaning phrase “all that” (252) and babbles about “sex vanity” (292), contemporary readers, again, must reaffirm what the Creator originally intended: love leads to marriage, which enables a man and a woman to engage in the rapturous physical activity of sex. Pity the man who marries a woman like Dorinda, who has “a distaste for physical love” (471)!

A final comment is necessary about the denouement. Although she is a warped feminist, Dorinda is a successful businesswoman. Moreover, she overcame her first experience of fornication and married another successful businessman in her home town. Why, then, at age thirty-three, doesn’t she feel “complete” (355)? Similarly, even though she has overcome major obstacles to her financial and social success, why does she still assert a hundred pages towards novel’s end, “Three months of love, and you pay for it with all the rest of your life” (412)? Finally, near the end of the novel—a mere four pages away from the ending—why does Dorinda regret “the love that she had never known and the happiness that she had missed” (522)? While she does claim “better by far the drab freedom” of simple women than the life of married women (88), the adjective clearly indicates that Dorinda disparages the single as much as she denigrates the married state. Does she not know that being a single woman is a fulfilling vocation like being a married woman, or a woman devoting herself to a religious order? Apparently, not. Remember: Dorinda hails from a Presbyterian form of Christianity in a rural Virginia area, so religious diversity and the two-thousand year history of Catholic Christianity are closed to her.

Hopefully, some of the above conjectures and ideas may help students working on literature essays for their secondary or college courses. The rest of us can simply delight in reading an early twentieth-century novel which functions as evidence that, even then, feminist writers were aware that a woman who closed herself to love led to an eventual unfulfilled life.

[Rita · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another good, tho' depressing, book by Glasgow about living in extreme isolation in rural Virginia in the early 1900s. I try to imagine my grandpa growing up there, tho' he was in a more fertile, more populated part of the state.

Ambition in a woman is one of the themes of the book.

Tho' probably Glasgow had extremely progressive views for her time, her generalizations sprinkled throughout the book about "the negro" are a reminder of the nearly totally segregated lives of the white and black communities. Sorry to say it may be, in many parts of the country, that not much has changed since then.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a magnificent novel by Ellen Glasgow.

This is the story of Dorinda Oakley's life in a Virginian farmland during the period of 1890 to 1920.

After a love disillusion case, she decides to move to a big city, and only by chance, she goes to New York City. The course of her life changes since then as a neurosurgeon and his wife show new directions that can take her own destination during her way back home.

Even with some mild traces of racism throughout her narrative, the author manages to captivate the reader with the constant struggle for Dorinda's survival in the fields of Virginia.

Thanks Bettie and Wanda for this book's recommendation, I really loved so much this book.

[Kathryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are looking for a Thomas Hardy-like read head straight to Ellen Glasgow..the detail, the characters, the story (ironic and sad like Hardy), it's all there and set in Virginia USA. I decided to read this book as the author was named a top favorite by Jonathan Yardley as he left the Washington Post after writing 3000 book reviews over 30 years. I didn't always agree with his reviews but this reccomendation was no disappointment.

Here's his final column if you want to know more:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinion...

[Elizabeth Sulzby · Rating 4 out of 5]

A hard, bleak read but very memorable. As an Alabamian and oft-times Virginian, I love all of Glasgow's books that I've read. I thought I had read them all but have come to realize that I haven't even read half of them. Glasgow is taught, I am told, in Womens Studies classes which is a real way to kill an author but hasn't done that to Flannery O'Connor or Eudora Welty. Maybe we'll have a "groundswell" for Glasgow from the literary cultures; I support that.

[Amy Gentry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written in 1925, reading it because I have to read popular American books from the twenties. The prose is purplish but the plot is unsentimental: a better, more brutal Gone With the Wind.

[K. A. O'Neil · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favourite books ever.

[Mandy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little too long and repetitive, but enjoyed it on the whole.

[BLRBrazil · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's really a 3.5 for me; certainly much better than a standard 3 but not outstanding enough to fully justify a 4 on my scale.
The book is nicely written and will probably touch women of all ages a lot more deeply, since the theme is growing up in a woman's body and the thought processes that entails.
The context is rural Virginia, USA over a period that covers the late 19thC, early 20thC, WWI and the post-war period and the book provides a fascinating insight into the hard rural life of those times and the creeping advances in technology.
But most of all, this book is about character, the basic ingredients that seem to come so naturally to some, have to be worked at so hard by others and appear to elude others altogether.
I kept thinking that Richard Burch would suddenly reappear and bring Dorinda the love she so richly deserved, but there is no place for sentimentaility in this book - it deals with real love, of the kind Jesus talked about. Although I confess that until the last few pages I feared Dorinda herself would miss that point, even though it is what had sustained her all through those 30+ years, both in the giving and the receiving.
It is a very profound description of the period (when the Civil War and slavery were still in people's memories) and, although times are very different today, I think there are valuable lessons here for many to benefit by and gain inspiration from.

[Lorraine · Rating 5 out of 5]

How did I not know about Ellen Glasgow? How have I only just read this book?

It is glorious, and you all should go read it right now.

It's set beginning in post-Civil War Reconstruction Era and goes through WWI, telling the coming of age story of Dorinda--the daughter trapped in a poor, Virginia farming family.

The way this book handles gender issues is so surprising and exciting for a book written in 1925. Dorinda is an astonishing woman.

I am also completely besotted with the way this novel uses descriptions of the natural world. It's masterfully done--on every page, in Dorinda's every thought. The land is another character. Barren Ground is one of the best examples of nature writing I've ever read.

(Contains period-specific racism)

[Razvan Banciu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, I'm maybe a little harsh on this lady, as there are a lot of things I've liked about this story. Dorinda Oakley, the main character, is an intelligent and hard working lady, who finds rural Virginia as her new home after some troubles in her personal life.
She's no more than twenty, as the book starts, and we'll see her life for the next thirty years, trying to solve all the problems regarding her family farm. And one of them, besides her personal troubles, is the returning of the eponymous "barren ground' into fertility.
So, far from being a bad book, this one needs some patience from the reader. You may have it, as well as you may not...

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am pleasantly surprised. The novel started out rather slow and uneventful, but by Part Two I was engrossed. Dorinda was a fascinating character and (although I usually do not enjoy books that takes place over several decades) it was a pleasure to follow her throughout her life. The three complaints I have: 1) Before major plot events there was often some sort of line, like "later on she would regret it," which completely destroyed suspense, 2) Too many colours, 3) It was occasionally depressing (I tend to avoid depressing novels).

[Cheyenne · Rating 5 out of 5]

At twenty years of age, Dorinda Oakley is jilted by the love of her life. She abandons her family and moves to New York. Tragedy brings her back to her family’s farm where she works to renew both the barren land and the purpose of her existence.

It’s a shame that this novel has been neglected by American school systems. The language is reminiscent of Willa Cather, but unlike Cather, Ellen Glasgow weaves elaborate inner monologues for her protagonist in an attempt to uncover the meaning and futilities of life. The novel is poignant, beautiful, and tragic.

[Mike Harnish · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this for our local book club. In the beginning, I didn't think that I would like, but as I progressed, it became a very interesting read. The Kindle edition had it share of it normal misspelled words, etc., but as long as you read it like it seemed what word should be there, it was a good read. I hate writing spoilers, and so I will just say that it was very interesting the farther I got into the book.

[Grace · Rating 2 out of 5]

What a slog. I read this to get a feeling for rural Virginia in the early 20th century for my own novel. But good god this was boring. I got a lot of description. Too much. The pacing is so uneven, the characters flat, and frankly I did not care. Skimmed the last few chapters. What a waste of time. I should’ve DNFed.

[Greg Leatherman · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a solid character study, with a flawed central character (Dorinda Oakley), but don't expect anything uplifting. For example, check out these themes: the pathos of life is worse than the tragedy; time avenges all; hard work is the comfort of the lonely; fate is cruel; weakness is a vice; character is destiny; etc.

Glasgow crafts naturalist prose and is at ease with symbolism, so much that the characters become products of the landscape. Barren Ground is a metaphor as well as a description . . .

It is worth noting that one of Dorinda's flaws is her simplistic view of the descendants of slaves whom she employs. It may be an accurate representation of the time, but I had to remind myself that it is a character, not the author, thinking these prejudiced thoughts. Also, some of the inner monologue is tedious at times and the secondary characters range from archetypal (her mother and younger brother are pretty interesting), to animistic (Dorinda's view of men is that they are a mystery she can never understand), to thinly drawn (persons of color). This is a book about three things: the land, time, and Dorinda Oakley.

However, I still found Dorinda's story both compelling and believable. You can always picture her and understand why she reacts the way she does, which is no small feat. Insofar as the other characters serve this narrative, they work well. Overall, it was a good read and one I would recommend to anyone in search of a serious look at pre-WWI life in rural Virginia. If you have an interest in that particular theme, add a star to this review, because Barren Ground was very good in evoking an isolated place and time.

[Barb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good, sad

[Melinda · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too much about the vegetation. I get it. It's ugly.