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Classics of Civil War Fiction
The Battle-Ground
The Battle-Ground, Ellen Glasgow's fourth novel, was her first bestseller, with more than 21,000 copies sold in just two weeks. The novel committed her to a project almost unparalleled in American literary history: a novelistic meditation on the South from the decade before the Confederacy to the middle of the 20th century. The Battle-Ground speaks of a South before and during the Civil War in its struggles to become part of a nation still in the making. The overthrow of the aristocratic tradition, the transfer of hereditary power to a rural underclass, the continued disenfranchisement of African Americans, and the evolving status of women--these topics, which came to bind the more than a dozen volumes of Glasgow's self-styled "social history," initially coalesced in The Battle-Ground.
The Battle-Ground conspicuously departs from the tradition of Southern romances popularized by Thomas Nelson Page, and contemporary reviewers praised the book for its historical accuracy. Glasgow, an ardent Anglophile, bragged that military officers in Great Britain studied its descriptions of battle. With her, realism had not only crossed the Atlantic, it had "crossed the Potomac."
But Glasgow never sensationalizes the Civil War, whose bloodiest scenes she flanks with domestic officers, the sharing of rations, the warmth of camp, and reminders of home. Her vision of the war centers less on its corruption or barbarity than on its occasions for small decencies and their power of humanization. Glasgow cannot separate the war from its greater social implications--it is a place, as her title suggests, that tests the soul of a nation as well as individual men and women. The importance of The Battle-Ground in Southern literary history cannot be overemphasized, for Glasgow's reimagining of the Civil War had a profound impact on the next generation of Southern writers, including Allen Tate, Stark Young, and Margaret Mitchell.
The Battle-Ground conspicuously departs from the tradition of Southern romances popularized by Thomas Nelson Page, and contemporary reviewers praised the book for its historical accuracy. Glasgow, an ardent Anglophile, bragged that military officers in Great Britain studied its descriptions of battle. With her, realism had not only crossed the Atlantic, it had "crossed the Potomac."
But Glasgow never sensationalizes the Civil War, whose bloodiest scenes she flanks with domestic officers, the sharing of rations, the warmth of camp, and reminders of home. Her vision of the war centers less on its corruption or barbarity than on its occasions for small decencies and their power of humanization. Glasgow cannot separate the war from its greater social implications--it is a place, as her title suggests, that tests the soul of a nation as well as individual men and women. The importance of The Battle-Ground in Southern literary history cannot be overemphasized, for Glasgow's reimagining of the Civil War had a profound impact on the next generation of Southern writers, including Allen Tate, Stark Young, and Margaret Mitchell.
558 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1902
24 people are currently reading
81 people want to read
About the author
Ellen Gholson Glasgow
153 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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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 8, 2025
The battles of the American Civil War are much in evidence, in all their horror and fury, in the second half of Ellen Glasgow’s 1902 novel The Battle-Ground; but this novel is not all strategy and tactics. Rather, Glasgow takes her time getting to the war, as she sets forth a social history of the plantation aristocracy of slaveholding antebellum Virginia, with battlefield violence not taking center stage until the second half of the novel.
Ellen Glasgow, of Richmond, Virginia, is a vitally important transitional figure in the history of Southern U.S. literature. She grew up in the post-Civil War years when sentimentalized images and visions of the Old South, slavery, and the Confederacy dominated Southern life; but she rejected that sort of jejune romanticism, and the penchant for realism that she demonstrated in her early-20th-century works looked ahead to the work of later Southern Renascence authors like William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Eudora Welty.
The Battle-Ground begins by describing life at two neighbouring plantations in the Shenandoah Valley region of Virginia. The owners of these plantations constitute different sides of the archetype of the slaveholding Southern planter.
Major Lightfoot, a veteran of both the War of 1812 and the Mexican-American War, embodies the more militant, and more openly pro-slavery, side of the antebellum Southern mind. Glasgow’s narrator thus describes the Major: “He was very tall and spare, and his eyebrows, which hung thick and dark above his Roman nose, gave him an odd resemblance to a bird of prey.”
Major Lightfoot is described at one point as believing that “the sons of Ham were under a curse which the Lord would lighten in His own good time”. At another point, the Major states that Virginia “made the Union, and we’ll unmake it when we please. We didn’t make slavery; but, if Virginia wants slaves, by God, sir, she shall have slaves!” The Major embodies the slaveholding classes’ prejudices regarding class as well as race, stating that “There’s no man alive that shall question the divine right of slavery in my presence; but – but it is an institution for gentlemen”. When asked about a proposal that the U.S. Government purchase enslaved people and arrange for their resettlement in Africa, the Major is outraged: “Sell the servants to the Government!...Nonsense! nonsense! Why, you are striking at the very foundation of our society! Without slavery, where is our aristocracy, sir?” For Major Lightfoot, clearly, slavery is a Biblically sanctioned institution that must remain in existence so that he can maintain what he sees as his rightful place in the Southern aristocracy.
In contrast with the thinking of Major Lightfoot is his neighbour Peyton Ambler, a former governor of Virginia who is always called “Governor” as an honorific. Governor Ambler is a slaveholder, too, but he puts his loyalty to the Union first. The Governor reports at one point that he gave a pro-Union speech in which he called upon his fellow Virginians, if compelled to choose between slavery and the Union, to “hold on to the flag,” and states that “I was applauded to the echo, and it would have done you good to hear the cheers.” Representing as he does a more moderate element of antebellum Virginia’s ruling class, Governor Ambler tells Major Lightfoot that “You are out of place in Virginia”, and adding that “Virginia wants peace, and she wants the Union. Go south, my dear sir, go south.” Clearly, Governor Ambler feels that Major Lightfoot would fit in better among the secessionist “fire-eaters” of South Carolina or Mississippi.
The younger generations of both these plantation households are also important characters in The Battle-Ground. Prominent in Major Lightfoot’s household is his grandson, Dan Montjoy – the son of an ill-advised union between Major Lightfoot’s daughter and a man of the Montjoy family that is well-known in the region for their wild-living and intemperate ways. Dan, with his noble bearing and his high-spirited manner, seems to be representative of the young Southern gentlemen of his time – particularly when an impetuous act alienates him from the Major and causes him to leave the Major’s estate.
Dan Montjoy is about the same age as Peyton Ambler’s daughters, Betty and Virginia. Glasgow often features in her fiction a relationship between two sisters – one who has more success in attracting the love of a man, and another who must draw upon other resources within herself in order to succeed and prevail. Dan is smitten with Virginia, though sometimes, “Half angrily, he asked himself if he were in love with a pink dress and nothing more?” Betty meanwhile fears that her love for Dan will go forever unrequited.
It is about halfway through the novel that one hears that John Brown has launched his anti-slavery raid against Harper's Ferry. When war comes, Dan joins a Virginia regiment of the Confederate Army. At Winchester, as Dan’s regiment marches off to the battlefront, cheered by crowds of townspeople, he looks ahead, with the Southern romanticism of his time and place, to the victory and glory that he expects to be his:
In the bright sunshine he saw the flash of steel and the glitter of gold braid, and the noise of tramping feet cheered him like music as he walked on gaily, filled with visions. For was he not marching to his chosen end – to victory, to Chericoke – to Betty? Or if the worst came to the worst – well, a man had but one life, after all, and a life was a little thing to give his country. Then, as always, his patriotism appealed to him as a romance rather than a religion – the fine Southern ardour which had sent him, at the first call, into the ranks, had sprung from an inward, not an outward pressure. The sound of the bugle, the fluttering of the flags, the flash of hot steel in the sunlight, the high old words that stirred men’s pulses – these things were his by right of blood and heritage. He could no more have stifled the impulse that prompted him to take a side in any fight than he could have kept his heart cool beneath the impassioned voice of a Southern orator. The Major’s blood ran warm through many generations.
But the war, after the initial Confederate victory at Bull Run/Manassas, turns out not to be what Dan had expected. Wounded amidst the carnage of the Battle of Antietam, Dan is carried with other wounded across the Potomac to Shepherdstown, where he is bedded down in a stable. As Union artillery shells from across the Potomac fall in the fields around Shepherdstown, a panic ensues within the town, as people attempt to flee to safety:
White and black, men and women, sick and well, they swarmed up and down in the dim sunshine beneath the flying shells, which skimmed the town to explode in the open fields beyond. The wounded were there – all who could stand upon their feet or walk with the aid of crutches – stumbling on in a mad panic to the meadows where the shells burst or the hot sun poured upon festering cuts….Dan, fevered, pallid, leaning heavily upon Big Abel, passed unnoticed amid a throng which was, for the most part, worse off than himself. Men with old wounds breaking out afresh, or new ones staining red the cloths they wore, pushed wildly by him, making, as all made, for the country roads that led from war to peace. It was as if the hospitals of the world had disgorged themselves in the sunshine on the bright September fields.
Passages like this one show Glasgow’s determination to provide a realistic, unromanticized view of the violence, horror, and fear of war.
Over the course of the war, Dan comes to question some of the social hierarchies that he once took for granted, particularly because of his friendship with his fellow soldier Pinetop, a mountaineer from western Virginia. The narrator says, with regard to Dan’s changing mindset, that “Until knowing Pinetop [Dan] had, in the lofty isolation of his class, regarded the plebeian in the light of an alien to the soil, not as a victim to the kindly society in which he himself had moved.”
The war also touches all the other characters in the novel. Governor Ambler, an opponent of secession, nonetheless becomes an officer in the Confederate Army once Virginia has voted to leave the Union. Virginia marries, but is put in danger by the privations of war; Betty, meanwhile, must try to keep the Amblers’ farm going while the war rages. One spends this part of the novel wondering who will succumb to one or another of the dangers of war, and who will survive (relatively) unscathed.
The Battle-Ground, Glasgow’s fourth novel, was her first best-seller, and it occupies an interesting place in the continuum of American Civil War literature. As mentioned above, Glasgow eschews romanticism in favour of realism in her descriptions of the wounds and illness caused by war; there is a moving passage late in the novel where wounded Union and Confederate soldiers try to help each other escape being burned alive in the forest fires that break out during the Battle of the Wilderness.
I also appreciated Glasgow’s emphasis on the strength of women; Betty Ambler, with her resourcefulness and determination, looks ahead to other strong women in Glasgow works like Barren Ground (1925), The Sheltered Life (1932), Vein of Iron (1935), and In This Our Life (1941).
As Glasgow consistently created in her fiction strong women who contravened the stereotype of the “helpless” Southern woman, so her treatment of race is also nuanced, in a manner that conflicts with the then-current “Lost Cause” ideology with its outrageous claims that enslaved African Americans were somehow “content” with living and dying in bondage. While Glasgow’s use of elaborate phonetic misspellings to convey African American dialect seems awkward, particularly when compared with her forays into Appalachian dialect, she portrays the situation of African Americans of the time in a manner of which “Lost Cause” authors wouldn’t have dreamed.
Betty often focuses sympathetically on the difficult situation of a free African American named Levi, whose anomalous status within the slaveholding South is a source of constant insecurity. And when an enslaved man named Big Abel goes to war with Dan – in what might seem, at first, an example of the Lost Cause archetype of the “faithful slave” accompanying his Confederate “master” to the battlefront – he does so by stealing himself out of slavery at Major Lightfoot’s plantation, linking his fortunes to those of a disowned young man who has lost everything, and thus incurring the old Major’s lasting wrath.
The Battle-Ground dates from early in the novelistic career of Ellen Glasgow; it seems less structurally unified than the later works of her artistic maturity. Even here, though, we see at work a perceptive aesthetic sensibility and an inquiring mind that would never be told what to think or what to believe.
Ellen Glasgow, of Richmond, Virginia, is a vitally important transitional figure in the history of Southern U.S. literature. She grew up in the post-Civil War years when sentimentalized images and visions of the Old South, slavery, and the Confederacy dominated Southern life; but she rejected that sort of jejune romanticism, and the penchant for realism that she demonstrated in her early-20th-century works looked ahead to the work of later Southern Renascence authors like William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Eudora Welty.
The Battle-Ground begins by describing life at two neighbouring plantations in the Shenandoah Valley region of Virginia. The owners of these plantations constitute different sides of the archetype of the slaveholding Southern planter.
Major Lightfoot, a veteran of both the War of 1812 and the Mexican-American War, embodies the more militant, and more openly pro-slavery, side of the antebellum Southern mind. Glasgow’s narrator thus describes the Major: “He was very tall and spare, and his eyebrows, which hung thick and dark above his Roman nose, gave him an odd resemblance to a bird of prey.”
Major Lightfoot is described at one point as believing that “the sons of Ham were under a curse which the Lord would lighten in His own good time”. At another point, the Major states that Virginia “made the Union, and we’ll unmake it when we please. We didn’t make slavery; but, if Virginia wants slaves, by God, sir, she shall have slaves!” The Major embodies the slaveholding classes’ prejudices regarding class as well as race, stating that “There’s no man alive that shall question the divine right of slavery in my presence; but – but it is an institution for gentlemen”. When asked about a proposal that the U.S. Government purchase enslaved people and arrange for their resettlement in Africa, the Major is outraged: “Sell the servants to the Government!...Nonsense! nonsense! Why, you are striking at the very foundation of our society! Without slavery, where is our aristocracy, sir?” For Major Lightfoot, clearly, slavery is a Biblically sanctioned institution that must remain in existence so that he can maintain what he sees as his rightful place in the Southern aristocracy.
In contrast with the thinking of Major Lightfoot is his neighbour Peyton Ambler, a former governor of Virginia who is always called “Governor” as an honorific. Governor Ambler is a slaveholder, too, but he puts his loyalty to the Union first. The Governor reports at one point that he gave a pro-Union speech in which he called upon his fellow Virginians, if compelled to choose between slavery and the Union, to “hold on to the flag,” and states that “I was applauded to the echo, and it would have done you good to hear the cheers.” Representing as he does a more moderate element of antebellum Virginia’s ruling class, Governor Ambler tells Major Lightfoot that “You are out of place in Virginia”, and adding that “Virginia wants peace, and she wants the Union. Go south, my dear sir, go south.” Clearly, Governor Ambler feels that Major Lightfoot would fit in better among the secessionist “fire-eaters” of South Carolina or Mississippi.
The younger generations of both these plantation households are also important characters in The Battle-Ground. Prominent in Major Lightfoot’s household is his grandson, Dan Montjoy – the son of an ill-advised union between Major Lightfoot’s daughter and a man of the Montjoy family that is well-known in the region for their wild-living and intemperate ways. Dan, with his noble bearing and his high-spirited manner, seems to be representative of the young Southern gentlemen of his time – particularly when an impetuous act alienates him from the Major and causes him to leave the Major’s estate.
Dan Montjoy is about the same age as Peyton Ambler’s daughters, Betty and Virginia. Glasgow often features in her fiction a relationship between two sisters – one who has more success in attracting the love of a man, and another who must draw upon other resources within herself in order to succeed and prevail. Dan is smitten with Virginia, though sometimes, “Half angrily, he asked himself if he were in love with a pink dress and nothing more?” Betty meanwhile fears that her love for Dan will go forever unrequited.
It is about halfway through the novel that one hears that John Brown has launched his anti-slavery raid against Harper's Ferry. When war comes, Dan joins a Virginia regiment of the Confederate Army. At Winchester, as Dan’s regiment marches off to the battlefront, cheered by crowds of townspeople, he looks ahead, with the Southern romanticism of his time and place, to the victory and glory that he expects to be his:
In the bright sunshine he saw the flash of steel and the glitter of gold braid, and the noise of tramping feet cheered him like music as he walked on gaily, filled with visions. For was he not marching to his chosen end – to victory, to Chericoke – to Betty? Or if the worst came to the worst – well, a man had but one life, after all, and a life was a little thing to give his country. Then, as always, his patriotism appealed to him as a romance rather than a religion – the fine Southern ardour which had sent him, at the first call, into the ranks, had sprung from an inward, not an outward pressure. The sound of the bugle, the fluttering of the flags, the flash of hot steel in the sunlight, the high old words that stirred men’s pulses – these things were his by right of blood and heritage. He could no more have stifled the impulse that prompted him to take a side in any fight than he could have kept his heart cool beneath the impassioned voice of a Southern orator. The Major’s blood ran warm through many generations.
But the war, after the initial Confederate victory at Bull Run/Manassas, turns out not to be what Dan had expected. Wounded amidst the carnage of the Battle of Antietam, Dan is carried with other wounded across the Potomac to Shepherdstown, where he is bedded down in a stable. As Union artillery shells from across the Potomac fall in the fields around Shepherdstown, a panic ensues within the town, as people attempt to flee to safety:
White and black, men and women, sick and well, they swarmed up and down in the dim sunshine beneath the flying shells, which skimmed the town to explode in the open fields beyond. The wounded were there – all who could stand upon their feet or walk with the aid of crutches – stumbling on in a mad panic to the meadows where the shells burst or the hot sun poured upon festering cuts….Dan, fevered, pallid, leaning heavily upon Big Abel, passed unnoticed amid a throng which was, for the most part, worse off than himself. Men with old wounds breaking out afresh, or new ones staining red the cloths they wore, pushed wildly by him, making, as all made, for the country roads that led from war to peace. It was as if the hospitals of the world had disgorged themselves in the sunshine on the bright September fields.
Passages like this one show Glasgow’s determination to provide a realistic, unromanticized view of the violence, horror, and fear of war.
Over the course of the war, Dan comes to question some of the social hierarchies that he once took for granted, particularly because of his friendship with his fellow soldier Pinetop, a mountaineer from western Virginia. The narrator says, with regard to Dan’s changing mindset, that “Until knowing Pinetop [Dan] had, in the lofty isolation of his class, regarded the plebeian in the light of an alien to the soil, not as a victim to the kindly society in which he himself had moved.”
The war also touches all the other characters in the novel. Governor Ambler, an opponent of secession, nonetheless becomes an officer in the Confederate Army once Virginia has voted to leave the Union. Virginia marries, but is put in danger by the privations of war; Betty, meanwhile, must try to keep the Amblers’ farm going while the war rages. One spends this part of the novel wondering who will succumb to one or another of the dangers of war, and who will survive (relatively) unscathed.
The Battle-Ground, Glasgow’s fourth novel, was her first best-seller, and it occupies an interesting place in the continuum of American Civil War literature. As mentioned above, Glasgow eschews romanticism in favour of realism in her descriptions of the wounds and illness caused by war; there is a moving passage late in the novel where wounded Union and Confederate soldiers try to help each other escape being burned alive in the forest fires that break out during the Battle of the Wilderness.
I also appreciated Glasgow’s emphasis on the strength of women; Betty Ambler, with her resourcefulness and determination, looks ahead to other strong women in Glasgow works like Barren Ground (1925), The Sheltered Life (1932), Vein of Iron (1935), and In This Our Life (1941).
As Glasgow consistently created in her fiction strong women who contravened the stereotype of the “helpless” Southern woman, so her treatment of race is also nuanced, in a manner that conflicts with the then-current “Lost Cause” ideology with its outrageous claims that enslaved African Americans were somehow “content” with living and dying in bondage. While Glasgow’s use of elaborate phonetic misspellings to convey African American dialect seems awkward, particularly when compared with her forays into Appalachian dialect, she portrays the situation of African Americans of the time in a manner of which “Lost Cause” authors wouldn’t have dreamed.
Betty often focuses sympathetically on the difficult situation of a free African American named Levi, whose anomalous status within the slaveholding South is a source of constant insecurity. And when an enslaved man named Big Abel goes to war with Dan – in what might seem, at first, an example of the Lost Cause archetype of the “faithful slave” accompanying his Confederate “master” to the battlefront – he does so by stealing himself out of slavery at Major Lightfoot’s plantation, linking his fortunes to those of a disowned young man who has lost everything, and thus incurring the old Major’s lasting wrath.
The Battle-Ground dates from early in the novelistic career of Ellen Glasgow; it seems less structurally unified than the later works of her artistic maturity. Even here, though, we see at work a perceptive aesthetic sensibility and an inquiring mind that would never be told what to think or what to believe.
November 10, 2021
I think this is not Glasgow's debut, but the first of several in which she depicts Virginia and how it changed through the years. This begins before the Civil War with two neighboring families who are slave owners. There is friction between them as the politics of slave owning and abolition become the talk of the day, and eventually the war itself intrudes.
My earlier reading of Glasgow was her Vein of Iron, whose title was a synonym for the strength of southern women. Most of the point of view of this novel was from that of Dan Montjoy and he is not a strong man. In the beginning he is almost as much a scoundrel as his father Jack Montjoy, but only 'almost' because we can see that Dan also has some of his mother's strength. There are strong women in this and we might believe Virginia would not have survived at all without them.
Glasgow writes realistically, for the most part. I say for the most part because the "aristocrats" have no accent, no dialect, while the poor whites do. The hardest reading in this was of the Negroes. Ef'n she spy out a speck er dus' on dem ar wheels, somebody gwine year f'om it, sho's you bo'n—en dat somebody wuz me. I have always objected to the disparity of such a portrayal. There are regional accents in almost every part of the US. It seems to me only right that an author either gives everyone an accent/dialect or no one.
The above is from Big Abel who accompanies his young master into war and so there is a fair amount of him and that made for slow reading to understand him. Early in the novel I remarked how far Virginia has come in the last 160 years - from slavery to electing a black woman to the 2nd highest statewide office. I mostly liked this novel and will allow it to crawl over the 3/4-star line.
My earlier reading of Glasgow was her Vein of Iron, whose title was a synonym for the strength of southern women. Most of the point of view of this novel was from that of Dan Montjoy and he is not a strong man. In the beginning he is almost as much a scoundrel as his father Jack Montjoy, but only 'almost' because we can see that Dan also has some of his mother's strength. There are strong women in this and we might believe Virginia would not have survived at all without them.
Glasgow writes realistically, for the most part. I say for the most part because the "aristocrats" have no accent, no dialect, while the poor whites do. The hardest reading in this was of the Negroes. Ef'n she spy out a speck er dus' on dem ar wheels, somebody gwine year f'om it, sho's you bo'n—en dat somebody wuz me. I have always objected to the disparity of such a portrayal. There are regional accents in almost every part of the US. It seems to me only right that an author either gives everyone an accent/dialect or no one.
The above is from Big Abel who accompanies his young master into war and so there is a fair amount of him and that made for slow reading to understand him. Early in the novel I remarked how far Virginia has come in the last 160 years - from slavery to electing a black woman to the 2nd highest statewide office. I mostly liked this novel and will allow it to crawl over the 3/4-star line.
October 25, 2008
My favourite of the Glasgow novels I've read so far; it depicts a Southern family and their friends & dependents during the Civil War in a manner that I found both sympathetic and fairly realistic. Glasgow's depiction of slavery was doubtless romanticised; she was a wealthy white girl from a wealthy old Virginian family, and she probably didn't have a lot of information about what slavery was really like -- but at the very least she didn't engage in the sort of sentimental defense of it that one finds in antebellum authors like Maria McIntosh. Would I like it as much on rereading, or would I be too aware of everything she was smoothing over?
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March 6, 2014
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6872
Opening: Toward the close of an early summer afternoon, a little girl came running along the turnpike to where a boy stood wriggling his feet in the dust.
"Old Aunt Ailsey's done come back," she panted, "an' she's conjured the tails off Sambo's sheep. I saw 'em hanging on her door!"
The boy received the news with an indifference from which it blankly rebounded. He buried one bare foot in the soft white sand and withdrew it with a jerk that powdered the blackberry vines beside the way.
"Where's Virginia?" he asked shortly.
The little girl sat down in the tall grass by the roadside and shook her red curls from her eyes. She gave a breathless gasp and began fanning herself with the flap of her white sunbonnet. A fine moisture shone on her bare neck and arms above her frock of sprigged chintz calico.
"She can't run a bit," she declared warmly, peering into the distance of the long white turnpike. "I'm a long ways ahead of her, and I gave her the start. Zeke's with her."
With a grunt the boy promptly descended from his heavy dignity.
January 6, 2015
Glasgow's 1929 Civil War novel. It follows the lives of family members in two adjacent plantations in Virginia, one run by a secessionist "Major" and the other by a pro-union Governor. The Major's grandsons and the Governor's daughters illustrate the upcoming generation of young people who are not so tied to slavery as they are to their relationships with slaves they have grown to love and work with side by side. The book seems to be Glasgow's attempt to show the side of the South that upheld honor in the face of dishonorable practices and their fight for just cause. Dan and Betty's love story is carried from childhood through after the war.
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March 31, 2013Free download available at Project Gutenberg
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