Ellen Glasgow photo

Ellen Glasgow

aka Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

American writer Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow won a Pulitzer Prize for

In This Our Life

(1941), her realistic historical novel of Virginia.

Born into an upper-class Virginian family, Glasgow at an early age rebelled against traditional expectations of women and authored 20 bestselling novels. Southern settings of the majority of her novels reflect her awareness of the enormous social and economic changes, occurring in the South in the decades before her birth and throughout her own life.

Beginning in 1897, she wrote her novels and many short stories, mainly about life in Virginia.

Glasgow read widely to compensate for her own rudimentary education. She maintained a close lifelong friendship with James Branch Cabell, another notable writer of Richmond. She spent many summers at the historic Jerdone Castle plantation estate of her family in Bumpass, Virginia; this venue reappears in her writings. Her works include:

The Descendant

(1897),

Phases of an Inferior Planet

(1898),

The Voice of the People

(1900),

The Battle- Ground

(1902),

The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields

(1904),

The Romance of a Plain Man

(1909),

Virginia

(1913),

The Builders

(1919),

The Past

(1920),

Barren Ground

(1925),

The Romantic Comedians

(1926),

They Stooped to Folly

(1929),

The Sheltered Life

(1932),

Vein of Iron

(1935),

In This Our Life

(1941).


“Her life, she knew, was becoming simplified into an unbreakable chain of habits, a series of orderly actions at regular hours. Vaguely, she thought of herself as a happy woman; yet she was aware that this monotony of contentment had no relation to what she had called happiness in her youth. It was better perhaps; it was certainly as good; but it measured all the difference between youth and maturity.”
Ellen Glasgow
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“Grandfather used to say that when a woman got ready to fall in love the man didn't matter, because she could drape her feeling over a scarecrow and pretend he was handsome...”
Ellen Glasgow
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“There is no support so strong as the strength that enables one to stand alone.”
Ellen Glasgow
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“...it is good for a man to do right, and to leave happiness to take care of itself...”
Ellen Glasgow
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“Most women want their youth back again; but I wouldn't have mine back at any price. The worst years of my life are behind me, and my best ones ahead.”
Ellen Glasgow
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“In the past few years, I have made a thrilling discovery ... that until one is over sixty, one can never really learn the secret of living. One can then begin to live, not simply with the intense part of oneself, but with one's entire being.”
Ellen Glasgow
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“The only difference between a rut and a grave are the dimensions.”
Ellen Glasgow
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“The afternoon slipped away while we talked -- she talked brightly when any subject came up that interested her -- and it was the last hour of day -- that grave, still hour when the movement of life seems to droop and falter for a few precious minutes -- that brought us the thing I had dreaded silently since my first night in the house.”
Ellen Glasgow
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“A little later, when breakfast was over and I had not yet gone up-stairs to my room, I had my first interview with Doctor Brandon, the famous alienist who was in charge of the case. I had never seen him before, but from the first moment that I looked at him I took his measure, almost by intuition. He was, I suppose, honest enough -- I have always granted him that, bitterly as I have felt toward him. It wasn't his fault that he lacked red blood in his brain, or that he had formed the habit, from long association with abnormal phenomena, of regarding all life as a disease. He was the sort of physician -- every nurse will understand what I mean -- who deals instinctively with groups instead of with individuals. He was long and solemn and very round in the face; and I hadn't talked to him ten minutes before I knew he had been educated in Germany, and that he had learned over there to treat every emotion as a pathological manifestation. I used to wonder what he got out of life -- what any one got out of life who had analyzed away everything except the bare structure.”
Ellen Glasgow
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“Moderation has never yet engineered an explosion”
Ellen Glasgow
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“The only differnce between a rut and a grave is their dimensions.”
Ellen Glasgow
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“All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.”
Ellen Glasgow
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