The Sheltered Life (1932)

Summary

Dorothea Brande, “Four Novels of the Month,” Bookman, 75 (August 1932), 405

As if to show that this grooming of girls for marriage to the end that they are wrecked as human beings is timeless and international comes Miss Ellen Glasgow's new book, The Sheltered Life … As always, the South is Miss Glasgow's scene, and a belle of the nineties and a girl of today are her twin heroines. Under its quiet manner this novel is one more indictment of our attitude toward sex, for little Jenny Blair Archbald is shown in the opening pages as a child of imagination, courage, and decency. In the end she has foundered in a swamp of inertia, of obsession with the philandering husband of a woman she worships, of appalling clandestine intrigue which leads her to betray everyone she has cause to love. Such a miasma of sex arises from the pages of The Sheltered Life as many a piece of open erotica might envy, yet Miss Glasgow leads you into the bog step by step, like one under an evil enchantment.

This is, I should say, frankly a thesis book, and the thesis is one we have all heard ad nauseam these last twenty years: that no good comes to a society which allows passion and chivalry to be separated. This has been the theme of more than one of Miss Glasgow's earlier novels; it was the endless and elaborately illustrated theme of Evelyn Scott's recent A Calendar of Sin.