University of Virginia Library

The Writer's Best Solace: Textual Revisions in Ellen Glasgow's The Past
by
R. H. W. Dillard

Halfway through her career, shortly after the publication of her tenth novel, Virginia, Ellen Glasgow wrote to her literary agent, Paul Revere Reynolds, that she could not interest herself in the writing of short stories: "The work is so tiresome that I'd rather not have the money they bring than try to write them."[1] Miss Glasgow had, indeed, expressed

her dislike for the form as early as 1898,[2] but by 1916 and those years immediately following, although still complaining,[3] she was writing stories with some regularity—enough of them, in fact, to collect into a volume, The Shadowy Third and Other Stories, in 1923. Despite her misgivings about attempting the short story, Miss Glasgow wrote these stories with the same artistic integrity and seriousness with which she approached her novels. This seriousness, attested to by her many published expressions of a belief in the function of art as the servant of truth[4] and by her refusal to allow her work to appear in "the second rate magazines,"[5] is most evident in her attitude toward revisions and in the care and extent of her revisions: "it is the act of scrupulous revision (the endless pruning and trimming for the sake of a valid and flexible prose style) that provides the writer's best solace even while it makes drudgery."[6]

Perhaps because of her stated attitudes about revision and her repeated statement that she wrote her later novels in three drafts,[7] Miss Glasgow's claims to be a reviser have been casually accepted by her critics, but with no formal attempt at corroboration. William W. Kelly, in his introduction to Ellen Glasgow's "The Professional Instinct," found the corrections and revisions in the manuscript of that unpublished story to be minor,[8] and, aside from that brief introduction, there has been no other account of Miss Glasgow's techniques of revision. One of her short stories, "The Past," affords an excellent opportunity for an analysis of those techniques, for the changes in the story from its original appearance to its publication in The Shadowy Third are both extensive and significant. The story appeared originally in Good Housekeeping [9] and first appeared in its revised form in Walter J. O'Brien's The Best Short Stories of 1921 (1922). Whether Miss Glasgow revised the story specifically for O'Brien's collection or merely supplied him with the text she had revised for her collection of stories, The Shadowy Third and Other Stories (1923), cannot be ascertained, but the revised version is absolutely identical in both books and in its other three appearances in Dare's Gift (the English edition of The Shadowy Third, 1924), Edward Wagenknecht's The Fireside Book of Ghost Stories (1947), and Richard K. Meeker's edition of The Collected Stories of Ellen Glasgow (1963). Curiously, Richard K. Meeker, in his edition of The Collected Stories, says that "There are fewer changes in this

story than in any other the author revised. She merely removed two unnecessary hyphens and added one necessary apostrophe."[10] Actually there are 190 changes in the story. Eighty-two of these are substantive, some as long as several paragraphs. The changes are of three general kinds: simple corrections and revisions of spelling and punctuation, single word changes for precision of meaning and texture, and larger revisions to heighten suspense and to increase the reader's awareness of the characters and the tensions between them.

The simplest changes, those in spelling and punctuation, although extensive (108 changes), are relatively unimportant. The punctuation changes, except for those involved with a substantive change, are usually made for consistency—the substitution of semi-colons for commas, and commas for dashes. Substituting a comma or a dash for a period, she occasionally changed punctuation for rhythmic effect, a stylistic element with which she was particularly concerned.[11] The spelling changes reflect Miss Glasgow's preference for the English spellings of many words, a preference which Maxwell Perkins delicately described when writing to her about the Virginia Edition of her novels: "The style used in almost all of your books is a modified Oxford spelling which is by no means the extreme English spelling, altho' 'theater' ends in RE, and 'honor' ends in OUR."[12] In this story, among other changes, color becomes colour, story becomes storey, and gray becomes grey.

Ellen Glasgow, who said that she had learned "the value of the precise word" from her reading of Maupassant early in her career,[13] always felt that "the search for the exact right word . . . is a perennial aspiration."[14] The word changes in this story are all in the direction of greater precision: light shone into a room rather than splashed, a rug is as soft as flowers rather than velvet turf, and the narrator feels an aversion for Mr. Vanderbridge's former wife upon first meeting her rather than an antagonism. Since the story is one of Miss Glasgow's ghost stories, highly influenced by Poe, texture is particularly important in the creation of effect, an effect in this instance of fear and unknowable horror. The narrator, Miss Wrenn, takes a position as personal secretary to Mrs. Vanderbridge in the story, and she finds the Vanderbridge home to be haunted by the ghost of Mr. Vanderbridge's first wife whom he cannot forget. Only Mrs. Vanderbridge and Miss Wrenn see the ghost who appears whenever Mr. Vanderbridge thinks of his former marriage. Miss Wrenn finds some love letters to the Other One (as they refer to the ghost) from another man, but Mrs.

Vanderbridge will not use this discovery to disillusion her husband and, thus, rid them of the ghost. Rather, she burns the letters, releasing the Other One from a bondage of hate by her good action, and triumphing "not by resisting, but by accepting; not by violence, but by gentleness; not by grasping, but by renouncing. . . . She had changed the thought of the past, in that lay her victory" (The Shadowy Third, p. 146). In a manner similar to Poe's use of the supernatural as a device for psychological revelation, Miss Glasgow's ghost is, then, the visible manifestation of Mr. Vanderbridge's obsessive attachment to the past. If Miss Glasgow's word changes help to maintain the necessary somber tone, they also function to clarify the meaning of the story. By the change of one word, emphasizing that the past rather than the ghost must be exorcized, at a point in the story when Miss Wrenn is first beginning to understand the relationship of the ghost with the past, Miss Glasgow made the psychological significance of the ghost, as well as the meaning of the story, clearer:

• Good Housekeeping This, I inferred, was the secret reason why my employer was sending the furniture away. She had resolved to clear the house of every association with the apparition. (p.162)
• The Shadowy Third This, I inferred, was the secret reason why my employer was sending the furniture away. She had resolved to clear the house of every association with the past. (p.138)

The most important revisions in the story also have to do with the necessary business of making a fantastic story seem realistic and with the clarification of the characters and their relationships. To give the story a more realistic base, Miss Glasgow added several specific details which, although not necessary to the plot of the story, do aid in setting the supernatural events in a solid and real surrounding. The maid, who simply sits while talking to the narrator in the magazine version of the story, knits in the revision; Mrs. Vanderbridge, who has influenza in the magazine, speaks, in addition, in a hoarse voice in the revised story. Miss Glasgow also heightened the suspense by introducing Mrs. Vanderbridge's nervousness early in the story with an added sentence: "I saw her feet tap the white fur rug, while she plucked nervously at the lace on the end of one of the gold-coloured soft pillows" (pp. 109-110). Miss Glasgow added another extensive passage at a point in the story when the narrator, Mrs. Vanderbridge's secretary, finds a disintegrating wedding bouquet and the packet of love letters, which she mistakenly thinks were from Mr. Vanderbridge to his former wife, the present ghost. In the magazine, she carries them directly to Mrs. Vanderbridge; Ellen Glasgow both increased the suspense and emphasized Mrs. Vanderbridge's generous love with the addition of the passage in the revised version:

Throughout her career, Ellen Glasgow was plagued with the misunderstanding of her readers, a misunderstanding which is still much in evidence and, in one instance at the height of her career, was so aggravated that she was forced to add a sentence to The Sheltered Life two years after its publication to explain that Eva Birdsong had killed her husband, an act made abundantly clear by the imagery of the chapter.[15] In this story, too, Miss Glasgow felt that she needed to focus attention precisely on Mr. and Mrs. Vanderbridge and that she needed to explain them more fully. To narrow the focus, she removed extraneous characters and offered less direct information about the narrator. She disposed of a second butler by the simple device of using a passive construction in the second paragraph of the story:

• Good Housekeeping A second man in livery took my name, and when I explained that I was the new secretary, he delivered me into the charge of an elderly lady's-maid . . . (p. 64)
• The Shadowy Third When I gave my name and explained that I was the new secretary, I was delivered into the charge of an elderly lady's-maid . . . (p. 107)

Not to over-characterize Miss Wrenn and also to avoid the appearance, early in the story, that the tension might lie between Mrs. Vanderbridge and the narrator, Miss Glasgow deleted a passage of conversation between the secretary and her employer, the only section of any length which she removed from the story:

In addition to the elimination of characters or the diminution of their roles, Miss Glasgow added considerable material essential to the understanding of her two central characters, Mr. and Mrs. Vanderbridge. Mr.

Vanderbridge, in particular, was treated very sketchily in the magazine version, so that Miss Glasgow added passages to enrich his characterization:

Despite a rather thorough account of Mrs. Vanderbridge's personality in the magazine, Miss Glasgow added several passages to characterize her further, for her good nature is especially essential to the resolution of the story. In one added passage, her maid speaks of her to the narrator:

Although "The Past" is a small and relatively insignificant example of Ellen Glasgow's fiction, the revisions it exhibits do reveal Miss Glasgow to have been the serious and careful reviser that she asserted. The minute changes in punctuation and spelling, the more important stylistic word changes, the very important changes in emphasis and the addition of necessary characterizing details, all show Miss Glasgow to have been conscious of her art and determined to develop it, even to have been willing to face the drudgery of revising her short stories, which she felt were her "least good work."[16] The revisions of this story, then, insofar as they are typical of the revisions in her larger work, are proof that Ellen Glasgow did indeed know "the writer's best solace," the continuing quest for the perfection of her art.

Notes