University of Virginia Library

Preliminary Materials of one sort or another for a number of Ellen Glasgow's novels are preserved in the Glasgow Collection of the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia.[1] In one sense, the most important of these are the three drafts of the recently published Beyond Defeat,[2] for they are the only full record of what was apparently Ellen Glasgow's invariable working method in the mature period which begins with Barren Ground. In another sense, however, the preliminary notes for Virginia are the most interesting. For although not nearly so extensive as the Beyond Defeat drafts, they represent the earliest stages of a novel which Ellen Glasgow's critics have placed with Barren Ground and The Sheltered Life as the really solid accomplishments of her career.[3] Indeed, one of the best of her critics has compared Virginia favorably with Maupassant's Une Vie and has said, "Par son contenu et par sa forme, Virginia restera son classique du Sud en évolution."[4] Thus these notes show Ellen Glasgow working

at full strength toward a novel whose power is undeniable, whereas the various drafts of Beyond Defeat show her working during a period of depression and failing power toward a not very distinguished result. In addition they represent a working method, by plot outlines, essentially different from that used in the composition of the later novels, and perhaps characteristic of her early period.

Before discussing what these notes have to tell about Ellen Glasgow's strategy as a writer and about the meaning of Virginia, it is necessary first to say something of the manuscripts from which they were drawn and the style in which they are here presented. For the most part the text is taken from a small black notebook containing one hundred sixty-three pages, all devoted to Virginia.[5] Added to this is a transcript of fifteen loose pages which are from an otherwise lost notebook which must have been exactly the same size as the one which contains the bulk of the material on Virginia.[6] Both manuscripts are in pencil in a hand which seems often hurried and is at times excruciatingly difficult to decipher. Anyone who reads through the notebook which contains most of the material on Virginia will become conscious of what seems a strikingly nervous, elliptical style, reflected perhaps also in the hurried handwriting. There are, to be sure, some pages of fluid and fully elaborated composition, and one would not expect lists of names, articles of clothing, and flowers to be anything but elliptical in their effect. But aside from the few fluid passages, the elliptical quality pervades the entire notebook. This kind of style is perhaps natural for a writer just beginning to set down ideas for scene, character, and action. The earliest notes for Beyond Defeat have this same quality. Perhaps, too, the "nervousness" of the style represents something of the excitement with which a writer elaborates a new idea which has become compelling, but not yet clear. But another factor in the style of these notes was the extremely small notebook (6 7/16" X 3⅝") in which they were written. The fact that there are some fully developed passages proves that the size of the book could not have been of overriding importance for the style of the notes. But probably this small book did provide an appropriate and to some degree encouraging medium for the more important factors that have been mentioned. Since it has been impracticable to present these notes in a line for line reprint of the notebooks, it is hoped that retaining the original and often erratic punctuation of the original will convey some of the flavor of the elliptical style. Four typical pages are reproduced below.

For the most part these notes consist of two chapter by chapter outlines of the novel, in which interest in character and motive and interest in plot are about equally divided. There are also a fairly large number of pages

devoted to the scenery of the novel, including such things as clothing and furniture. In A Certain Measure Ellen Glasgow wrote: The implication seems to be that the process of composition was made fluid by an utter clarity about character and theme. These notes surely contradict that claim, just as they contradict the statement that she never had to "wonder what should come next in my narrative, or whither it was leading me." The process of composition was simply not what she implies it was. But if the passage is taken to refer to the external events of Virginia's life, then the claim is solidly supported by the notes. They show that from the first, Ellen Glasgow had a firm grasp of the events of her heroine's life, a grasp which was to become still firmer in the second chapter outline. And since, in the final form of the novel, Virginia's character and destiny are the life of the story, this early clarity about the sequence of events in Virginia's life was importantly responsible for the structural coherence of the final version.

Although Ellen Glasgow understood Virginia and her history from the first, she was not so clear about some of the other characters in the novel. Indeed, her handling of Miss Priscilla Batte and Miss Willy Whitlow is hardly changed from these early outlines to the final version. But in the case of Cyrus Treadwell, it is clear that at first she planned for him to have an importance in the structure of the novel which would have meant significant changes in his character and, indeed, in the theme of the book. In the early pages of the first outline, Ellen Glasgow identified the theme of the novel as the "transition from an aristocratic to a commercial civilization" (see MS. pp. 2-3). And it appears that she had originally intended Cyrus and his career to be the most overt embodiment of that theme. Consequently she planned a history of Cyrus' rise to power which was to run parallel to Virginia's story throughout the novel. He was to have become a sort of arch-villain of commercial success in a plot which showed him at the end of the war borrowing ten dollars from Gabriel Pendleton and investing it in a herd of hogs, which investment was to become the ignoble basis of his later fortune (p. 35). Then he was to cheat his friend Gabriel by buying from him cheaply some land which he knew was to increase enormously in value (p. 8). By collaborating with a rich carpetbagger, Glade, he was then to acquire a railroad with the help of northern capital (p. 36). But the main part of his history was to have been concerned with a

struggle for power between himself and an industrialist and railroad owner named Goode.[8] Goode is mentioned first on the fourth page of the notebook as "a dogged character, who fights on even after he has lost." Later the bare statement that "Goode has no business head" occurs (p. 17), and toward the middle of the first outline, Ellen Glasgow reminds herself that she needs to have a chapter on Cyrus' "persecution of Goode on account of the Appomattox R. R." (p. 40). Then Goode is mentioned again on page forty-seven, and on the next page Cyrus' "triumph over Goode in the shipping of cotton" is noted. On page fifty-eight Ellen Glasgow records again her intention to devote an entire chapter to Cyrus' struggle with Goode, this time to his final triumph over Goode. This victory is mentioned again toward the end of the first outline (p. 79). And still later is found the assertion that Cyrus is broken by Goode's death because he, Cyrus, has nothing to live for (p. 85).

Throughout the first outline Goode remains an obscure figure, an almost anonymous victim of Cyrus' will to power. At the beginning of the second outline, however, some concrete information is given about him. He is obviously a strong character, a man who single-handed builds a railroad after the war out of discarded rails, a broken down engine, and ties made from his own lumber (p. 101). He fights stubbornly for the life of his railroad (p. 120).

From the clues given about Cyrus' struggle with Goode, one can reconstruct Ellen Glasgow's intention, especially if these clues are taken with some other statements about Cyrus. In the second outline, for instance, Cyrus' method of getting control of the Dinwiddie Railroad is summarized:

And in the first outline there is a reference to a scheme, presumably Cyrus', to crush an enemy by allowing his competitor preferential rates on his railroad (p. 59). A minor episode in Cyrus' history was to have been his gaining control of the local newspaper, The Dinwiddie Bee. This episode is first mentioned on page forty, where Honest Tom Tucker, the name originally given to Tom Peachy, editor of the newspaper, is mentioned. And Cyrus' victory over the editor is recorded early in the second outline (p. 121). One last detail will perhaps help our understanding of what Ellen Glasgow intended with Cyrus. In the second outline a chapter is summarized in which Gabriel Pendleton goes to Cyrus to ask him to make his factory safe by putting up fire escapes and improving the stair case, and Cyrus refuses.

All of these details show that originally Cyrus was to have been a villain of the Machiavellian stripe, a melodramatic and almost allegorical embodiment of the active principle of evil in commerce and materialism.

His victory over Goode was surely to have been the defeat of an aristocrat struggling by all honest means to rebuild something of what he and his society had lost at the end of the war. Similarly his crushing of the editor of The Dinwiddie Bee was to have meant the silencing of a public voice which stood for high ideals and noble sentiments, and the intrusion into public life of all manner of crassness and vulgarity. And all of this was to have been accomplished with the same ruthlessness with which Cyrus cheated Gabriel Pendleton of his land and with which he acquired right of way for his railroad. Clearly also Cyrus' gradual commercial success was to have run parallel to Virginia's personal tragedy. It was to have been a public and external mirror of the private and internal story of the novel's heroine.

Almost none of this finds place in the final version of Virginia. Cyrus' character is drastically modified and the history of his unscrupulous rise to power is almost completely eliminated. There were undoubtedly purely practical reasons for Ellen Glasgow's decision not to include an elaborate development of her theme in terms of Cyrus' history. As the outlines show, originally she had planned to devote a number of chapters to that subject, and she probably saw that a treatment of it on the scale she had planned would have meant a book of unconscionable length. Yet, other more substantial reasons must have guided her decision too. She must have seen that so elaborate a treatment of Cyrus and the public victory of commerce and materialism over aristocratic idealism could only weaken the effect of what was from the first her main interest, the character and fate of Virginia. At any rate her decision to abandon Cyrus as villain represents a subtle but important change in the theme announced in the first outline. There she had written:

To a large extent, Ellen Glasgow had abandoned this theme by the time she came to write the final version. For there the emphasis is on a critical, yet sympathetic, examination of the pastoral idealism which formed the character of the aristocratic southern lady. In Virginia this idealism is defeated not so much by materialism as by its own weakness, its inability to respond to the realities of experience, its irrelevance to a life more complex than the pastoral myth of the old South. In this new conception of the theme of the novel, neither Cyrus' history nor his character as evil genius of materialism is very relevant. Consequently his character is reduced from the melodramatic to the realistic level. He is finally characterized by mean-spiritedness and petty tyranny. He becomes a sign of the times, a sign that power had passed from the aristocratic land owner, who could foster a pastoral mythology because he could afford it and protect it, to a new kind of man who was creating a new world and a new mythology. Because such characters as Susan Treadwell and John Henry Pendleton see the demands and opportunities of the new conditions they thrive without losing their humanity. Virginia, on the other hand, lives deep within her myths, seeing neither the demands nor the opportunities of the world around her. She is bewildered by one and frightened by the other. Her tragedy is the pathos of any beautiful but obsolete thing.

What Virginia's myths foster, a passive and self-effacing gentleness, an ability to color the ordinary and often shoddy realities with romance, and an unshakeable devotion to her family, is her strength as a character. But as it gives her strength, it also disastrously inhibits curiosity and intelligence, and it is this defect in her character that lies at the heart of her personal tragedy. Even in the outlines, particularly in the second one, Ellen Glasgow had seen this clearly. At the start of the second outline she notes that she needs to treat the "effect of Virginia's unselfishness on his [Oliver's] character" (p. 92). And that effect is noted later in the outline:

Again in the second outline, Oliver's "irritation at Virginia's lack of artistic sympathy" is noted along with her absorption in "little practical cares" (p. 129). Virginia's strength as a character, her unfailing selflessness and her total devotion to the small affairs of her family, is at the same time her defect, her inability to comprehend her husband's character and ambitions and to provide anything of the stimulation and criticism which he needs.

It was because Ellen Glasgow's understanding of Virginia's fundamental defect was so clear that, between the first and second outlines, she totally changed the character of Margaret Oldcastle, the actress for whom Oliver divorces Virginia. Toward the end of the first outline, Ellen Glasgow had written of Margaret Oldcastle:

But by the beginning of the second outline she had changed this picture of an unscrupulous, passion-driven woman so that she becomes At least now she is allowed good impulses and her lack of control is given a justifying explanation. The final modification, which in fact formed the basis of the actress's characterization in the final version, occurs toward the end of the second outline: These modifications of Margaret Oldcastle's character show Ellen Glasgow progressively sharpening her concept of Virginia as a tragic figure. They show her deciding to make Virginia's tragedy a matter of her own character, rather than of external circumstance. As it turns out, Margaret Oldcastle represents what Oliver needs, and cannot find in Virginia, a tough and lively intelligence and an active, outward-thrusting personality.

One last example will show how, in the process of writing these outlines, Ellen Glasgow made minor characters effective for the development of her theme. Aunt Belinda, the wife of Cyrus Treadwell, is first described as "an idealist crushed by compliant materialism" and by "the triumphal car of success" (p. 31). She is also called a "doting mother," for whom her children had the greatest contempt (p. 32). In the second outline Ellen Glasgow talks of "poor spiritless Mrs. Treadwell" and of her "mental and physical slovenliness" (p. 112), and finally of her terror of her husband and of "her pitiful clinging to little pieces of the past" (p. 114). In the second outline one can see the "crushed idealist" and "doting mother" of the first outline being transformed into the pitiful psychological wreck of the final version. In the process Mrs. Treadwell becomes one of the three women who function as mirrors of the heroine's character and situation. The chief of these is Virginia's mother, who represents what is best in her character and in the pastoral idealism which formed her.[15] Another is Mrs. Tom Peachy, whose eternally cheerful fortitude makes it possible for her to support a husband whose chief occupation since the war has been drinking. She represents something of Virginia's situation after the collapse of Oliver's early ambitions. Then Belinda Treadwell, the darkest of these mirrors, begins to cast her somber light on Virginia at the end of the novel as her tragedy reaches and then passes its crisis. These three women, all creatures of the same myths that give Virginia her consciousness, work out in their lives the implications of the ideal of the southern lady, implications which are developed more subtly in the life of the heroine.

The changes in character and incident which have been discussed so far can all be explained by supposing that during and after the writing of the two preliminary outlines Ellen Glasgow's thinking about the theme of her book became clearer and clearer. On the other hand, the outlines show a confusion about the character of Oliver Treadwell which was never entirely resolved. This lack of clarity about Oliver is the least satisfactory thing about the final version, and the outlines show in direct and simple

terms what the nature of the confusion was.[16] In the first outline it is clear that Ellen Glasgow saw Oliver as an embodiment of the announced theme of the struggle between idealism and materialism. She first describes him as a "Treadwell turned artist" (p. 33), and on the next page clarifies that comment by calling him a "materialist turned romantic." Then about the middle of the first outline she notes "the complete and final adjustment of Oliver to present conditions" and calls this adjustment "materialism triumphant" (p. 67). At the end of the first outline she summarizes her conception of Oliver's character: In fact, this struggle is not of any great importance in Oliver's character, though traces of it remain in the final version to weaken his credibility. At the crucial moment of his life the real struggle is between two forms of idealism. As an artist his idealism is utopian, as Ellen Glasgow herself notes in the second outline (p. 113). That is to say, the thrust of his ambition is outward into the present. He hopes to bring his civilization to a recognition of the truths of reality by a devastating attack on its illusions. His love of Virginia, who represents the illusory view of reality in its most radical form, is directly opposed to his ideals as an artist. Throughout the two outlines and in the final version as well Ellen Glasgow explains Oliver's character in terms of a decline from his original ideals to a complacent acceptance of the cheap values of contemporary society. At the beginning of the first outline she writes: And in the middle of the second outline she adds: Yet his decline is implicit in his marriage to Virginia, which reveals him as a man who has "the temperament of genius without the quality" (p. 9). And Ellen Glasgow fails fully to grasp this fact. She does, in both the outlines and the final version, rather ignore it, and she can write:

One other aspect of Oliver's character never became clear in Ellen Glasgow's mind, and that is his saving grace of cynicism and bitterness.

She treats this quality instead as simply a part of the general degeneration of his character.[21] It is, however, the only thing that saves him from a life both complacent and unauthentic. One critic has supposed that Oliver's prospects at the end of the novel are bleak,[22] and I think Ellen Glasgow would have agreed. Yet if one gets outside the author's absorption in the tragedy of her heroine, his prospects do not look bleak at all. How could they be with a woman so magnificently alive as Margaret Oldcastle. His refusal to accept complacently his failure as a man and as an artist makes possible in the end what looks like a genuine rehabilitation.

When one looks carefully at the outlines and then at the final version of Virginia, one can see that Oliver interested Ellen Glasgow as a character in his own right, as a type of the gifted but immature artist who has to pass through failure and disillusionment to arrive. Yet so concerned was she with the life of her heroine that she willingly used Oliver as an expedient for elaborating her primary interest. In the process she obscured his motives and character.

It remains now to describe the extent to which these outlines form the basic material of the finished novel. For in spite of the changes and omissions that have been discussed, the shape of the novel is fundamentally that given it in the outlines, and it is fascinating to follow the process by which the details, scenes and descriptions of the outlines were taken into the final version. Some passages were used almost without modification. The description of Miss Priscilla Batte which occupies pages thirteen through sixteen of the first outline is the most considerable of these.[23] But the description of the parsonage and of the Treadwell's home in the loose notes are similarly appropriated.[24] A fairly long passage from the first outline which treats Cyrus as a worshipper of convention is used verbatim,[25] as is another from the same outline which describes the naive assurance of perpetual happiness with which Oliver and Virginia enter marriage.[26]

More interesting even than these examples of unchanged intention from outlines to novel—I have mentioned only a few—are the many passages which acquire a new status as they pass from the outlines into the novel. Perhaps the most interesting of these is a passage from the second outline which was originally planned to come toward the end of the novel after Oliver had asked Virginia for a divorce and she had returned from New York to Dinwiddie:

In a much modified version this passage is used to describe Virginia's state of mind just before her marriage.[28] And one can speculate that Ellen Glasgow found the passage more appropriate for a subtly ironic treatment of young Virginia's idyllic expectations than for the portrait of a woman who had become self-pitying in defeat.

Another interesting example of the transformation of material from the outlines occurs at the end of the first outline. At the end of the second outline Virginia's son "finds her in a city square. Takes her into a cheap restaurant and coaxes her to eat." and the story ends "with the triumph of motherhood and filial love—" (p. 156). Fortunately, the novel does not end with any kind of triumph, but just what kind of triumph Ellen Glasgow had in mind may perhaps be seen in the ending of the first outline, a part of which reads:

Undoubtedly the author realized that Virginia's tragedy had to be genuine, not to be redeemed, or rather cheapened, by a false happy ending. Consequently, in the final version she used the passage quoted, not at the end of the novel, but rather in a scene in which Virginia desperately and pathetically attempts to escape the harsh fact of Oliver's desertion by recreating in fancy her happy youth.[30]

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about the early drafts of a gifted writer is that they sometimes record the stages by which, for the writer, the hypothetical and abstract become concrete and actual. Occasionally we can see characters ceasing to be simply names and descriptions of qualities and features to become instead imitations of life who confront the writer with their own appropriate voices and gestures. William Faulkner once explained that what he did was to follow his characters about and take down what they said. If not every talented writer has Faulkner's uncanny ability to hear his characters saying the right things in the right way, still it is there to some extent, and it is what makes the writer's imitation credible. Even in these early notes one can occasionally see characters begin to claim their own identity and to say the things that they would inevitably say. The most interesting, because it is the clearest, example occurs early in the first outline where Ellen Glasgow is making rather unorganized notes on theme and character. She writes:

In the midst of these unconnected and abstract jottings, Ellen Glasgow hears Gabriel Pendleton, the Christian soldier, speak the regret that he sometimes feels "in the dead of sweltering summer nights."[32] And its very lack of connection with anything around it suggests that it came to her forcefully, as an unmistakable expression of the man's character. Similar examples occur in the second outline, where Ellen Glasgow records the opening lines of one of Virginia's letters to her mother,[33] and catches Cyrus Treadwell in a characteristic retort to an appeal to his nobler nature.[34]

Although I have discussed what seemed to me the most interesting features of these preliminary notes for Virginia, other scarcely less interesting features have been undoubtedly neglected. Those who admire Ellen Glasgow's work will, for instance, find the nine separate versions of the opening scene of the novel fascinating, and they will want to follow the way in which small details of scene, appearance and action are taken into the final version of the novel. In a sense, everything in these notes is significant for an understanding of Ellen Glasgow's imagination and art.

It remains for me to say something of the method used for representing interlineations and deletions in this edition. Interlineations from the notebooks are brought down into the text in italics after the word or words in the text that they are meant to modify or amplify. Deletions in the notebooks are represented in this edition in square brackets. Occasionally I have not been able to decipher Ellen Glasgow's hand. On such occasions, a conjectural reading has been supplied within pointed brackets.[35]