The Romance of a Plain Man (1909)

Summary

Francis Hackett, “Amateur Romance,” Chicago Evening Post, 14 May 1909

It is known to many tramps that within a forty-mile radius of Chicago there are still to be found farmhouses absolutely innocent of modern improvements, preserving primitive, insanitary and uncomfortable conditions with pioneer fidelity. To compare Miss Glasgow's amateur romance to one of these establishments would be violent, but her determined adherence to the ancient coincidences and still more ancient sentimentalisms of yesteryear shocks one into realizing that ideas are slow to permeate, that the contrast between Cook County and McHenry is nothing to the contrast between Shaw and Glasgow. Miss Glasgow does not write primitive, uncomfortable or insanitary romance if she is to be compared' with Miss Amelia Barr or Miss Braddon. But in an era when Mr. Wells has published Kipps and Tono-Bungay, and Mr. Galsworthy has written Fraternity, the survival of tales like the present one is precisely as astounding as the survival of a certain paleozoic hotel in the village of Wauconda.

Miss Glasgow has to be acquitted of any serious study of her art. She has written novels in the past, but she still has an amateur idea of fiction form. Otherwise she would never have attempted to make this romance the autobiography of a railroad president. Narrative in the first person presents uncommon difficulties, but Miss Glasgow has audaciously taken romance to mean license, and from the start expects us to resign to the convention that a man of affairs would talk in the pretty idiom of a southern lady.