The Old Dominion Edition of the Works of Ellen Glasgow (1929-33)

Summary

James Branch Cabell, “Two Sides of the Shielded” New York Herald Tribune Books, 20 April 1930, sec. 11, pp. 1, 6

A definitive collection of the works of Ellen Glasgow has very happily begun with the publishing of revised versions of four of her novels of Southern life, and with yet four other of her books announced for inclusion in this handsome Old Dominion Edition a little later in the year. The event is fortunate, if but as indicating a vague elementary justice to exist now and then even in literary affairs.

For the belatedness of Ellen Glasgow's general recognition as the foremost woman novelist of America seems nowadays quite extraordinary. She had been publishing for twenty-eight years with a considerable if varying meed of popular success.

Her vogue, even as a Southern writer, was distinctively third-rate, with Miss Mary Johnston and Mr. Henry Sydnor Harrison well in the lead. In fact, throughout these twenty-eight years Ellen Glasgow had published as if it were in the obscuring shadow of the famousness and the large sales of Mary Johnston. Ellen Glasgow was considered, if at all, in connection with Mary Johnston. Ellen Glasgow was that other Virginian woman who wrote books: and some of her books had in their season been fairly popular.

Thus matters stood until the appearance of her fifteenth novel, when Barren Ground was brought out, in the spring of 1925. Then alone did it occur to any one of any least importance-so far as I know-to appraise seriously the work of Ellen Glasgow by any aesthetic canons.