The Ancient Law (1908) portrayed white factory workers in the Virginia textile industry, and analyzes the rise of industrial capitalism and its corresponding social ills. Critics considered the book overly melodramatic. With The Romance of a Plain Man (1909) and The Miller of Old Church (1911) Glasgow began concentrating on gender traditions; she contrasted the conventions of the Southern woman with the feminist viewpoint, a direction which she continued in Virginia (1913).
As the United States women's suffrage movement was developing in the early 1900s, Glasgow marched in the English suffrage parades in the spring of 1909. Later she spoke at the first suffrage meeting in Virginia and was an early member of the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia. Glasgow felt that the movement came "at the wrong moment" for her, and her participation and interest waned. Glasgow did not at first make women's roles her major theme, and she was slow to place heroines rather than heroes at the centers of her stories. Some called her Virginia (1913; about a southern lady whose husband abandons her when he achieves success), Life and Gabriella (1916; about a woman abandoned by a weak-willed husband, but who becomes a self-sufficient, single mother who remarries well), and Barren Ground (1925); discussed below, her "women's trilogy." Her later works have heroines who display many of the attributes of women involved in the political movement.
Glasgow published two more novels, The Builders (1919) and One Man in His Time (1922), as well as a set of short stories (The Shadowy Third and Other Stories (1923)), before producing her novel of greatest personal importance, Barren Ground (1925).
Written in response to the waning romantic relationship with Henry W. Anderson, Barren Ground is a story that chronicles the life events of the main heroine. Due to a troubled childhood, the heroine looks for her escape in the form of companionship with the opposite sex. She meets a male companion and gets engaged, only for the companion to leave to New York and desert her. In the end, the heroine concludes that physical relationships with the opposite sex are meaningless and devotes herself to running her farm. Though she triumphs over the man that abandoned her, that victory is as bare and empty as the barren ground in the description of the introduction. Glasgow wrote Barren Ground in retrospect to her own life, and the heroine's life mirrors hers almost exactly. Glasgow reverses the traditional seduction plot by producing a heroine completely freed from the southern patriarchal influence and pits women against their own biological natures. Though she created an unnatural and melodramatic story that did not sell well with the public, it was hailed as a literary accomplishment by critics of the time. The imagery, descriptive power, and length of the book conveys the “unconquerable vastness” of the world. What endures in the novel is not the ideals of a cynical woman, but rather the landscape that is farmed by generations of humans who spend their brief time on earth on the land. Glasgow portrays the insignificance of human relationships and romance by contrasting it directly to the vastness of nature itself.
By writing Barren Ground, a "tragedy," she believed that she freed herself for her comedies of manners The Romantic Comedians (1926), They Stooped to Folly (1929), and The Sheltered Life (1932). These late works are considered the most artful criticism of romantic illusion in her career.
She is of the South; but she is not by any manner of means provincial. She was educated, being a delicate child, at home and at private schools. Yet she is by no means a woman secluded from life. She has wide contacts and interests. . . . Here is a really important figure in the history of American letters; for she has preserved for us the quality and the beauty of her real South.
Artistic recognition of her work may have climaxed in 1931 when Glasgow presided over the Southern Writers Conference at the University of Virginia.
Glasgow produced two more "novels of character", The Sheltered Life (1932) and Vein of Iron (1935), in which she continued to explore female independence. The latter and Barren Ground of the previous decade remain in print.
In 1941 Glasgow published In This Our Life, the first of her writings to take a bold and progressive attitude towards black people. Glasgow incorporated African Americans into the story as main characters of the narrative, and these characters become a theme within the novel itself. By portraying the blatant injustices that black people face in society, Glasgow provides a sense of realism in race relations that she had never done before. Due to the ambiguity of the ending, the novel received a mixed and confused response from the public. There is also a distinct discontinuity between critics of the time and the reading public, as the critics, notably her friends, hailed the novel as a "masterpiece,” and the novel won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1942. The novel was quickly bought by Warner Brothers and adapted as a movie by the same name, directed by John Huston and released in 1942.
Her autobiography, The Woman Within, published in 1954, years after her death, details her progression as an author and the influences essential for her becoming an acclaimed Southern woman writer. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was gathering information for her commissioned biography of Ellen Glasgow prior to her death.
Glasgow died in her sleep at home on November 21, 1945, and is buried in Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia. The Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia maintains Glasgow's papers. Copies of Glasgow's correspondence may be found in the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings papers at the George A. Smathers Libraries Special Collections at the University of Florida. The Library of Virginia honored Glasgow in 2000 as she became a member of the inaugural class of Virginia Women in History.
By basing her novels off of her own life, Glasgow accurately portrayed the changing nature of Southern society. She was the founder of the realism movement in Southern literature that was previously made up by idealistic escapist writers such as William Faulkner, who considered Reconstruction as "the greatest humiliation in Southern history."
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"Evasive Idealism” in Literature
By Ellen Glasgow
What is the matter with American literature? There are many answers that might be made to this often-asked question. "Nothing" might be one answer. "Commercialism" might be another. But the answer given by Ellen Glasgow, whose latest successful novel of American manners and morals is Life and Gabriella, is "evasive idealism."
I found the young woman who has found in our Southern States themes for sympathetic realism rather than picturesque romance temporarily resident, inappropriately enough, in a hotel not far from Broadway and Forty-second Street. And I found her to be a woman of many ideas and strong convictions. One strongly felt and forcibly expressed conviction was that the "evasive idealism" which is evident in so much of our230 popular fiction is in reality the chief blemish on the American character, manifesting its baleful influence in our political, social, and economic life. Miss Glasgow first used the term "evasive idealism" in an effort to explain why contemporary English novels are better than contemporary American novels.
"Certainly," she said, "the novels written by John Galsworthy and the other English novelists of the new generation are better than anything that we are producing in the United States at the present time. And I think that the reason for this is that in America we demand from our writers, as we demand from our politicians, and in general from those who theoretically are our men of light and leading, an evasive idealism instead