Phases of an Inferior Planet (1898)

Summary

William Morton Payne, “Recent Fiction,” Dial, 25 (16 September 1898), 172

Miss Ellen Glasgow, whose strong novel, The Descendant, attracted much attention a year or so ago, has published a second story with the strange title, Phases of an Inferior Planet. What this means we hardly venture to say. Mercury and Venus are the only inferior planets known to astronomy, and Miss Glasgow's story is distinctly one of this mundane sphere. Probably the title aims to suggest the faultiness of earthly existence, an impression fortified by perusal of the novel, which tells us of human lives turned awry in the most perverse fashion. We can hardly wax sympathetic over a hero who learns nothing more from suffering than to make his career a living lie, and the heroine, winsome as she is in the earlier chapters, loses hold upon our interest when she deserts her husband for a life of ease such as he is unable to secure for her. The book has alternations of vivacity and sombre strength that make it undeniably interesting, but seems to be based upon no controlling idea except that of two mismated people, and the wretchedness that invades the life of husband and wife when neither of them can possibly understand the temperament of the other.

“Strength Gone Astray,” New York Times Saturday Review of Books and Art, 17 September 1898, p. 617

Rather more than a year ago The Descendant, appearing anonymously, gave a new sensation to the jaded novel-reading public.