University of Virginia Library

THE PERSONAL ELLEN GLASGOW

A WOMAN reporter was once interviewing Ellen Glasgow at a New York hotel. As she proceeded with her questions she suddenly asked:

"Where did you go to school, Miss Glasgow?"

The Virginia novelist hesitated a moment, blushed considerably, and then replied:

"I never went to school."

"How did you learn to read?" asked the reporter.

"Well, to tell the truth," answered the author, "I taught myself at home. I picked the letters out of Scott's novels under the direction of my mother, and then reading came easy."

Thus Miss Glasgow had no opportunity to shine as editor of a college paper or to glow as the "brightest literary light" in her class. From that day, not so long ago, when she played in the quaint old Southern garden of a real old Virginia homestead until now, when her books have a wide audience, she has been a "home" person pure and simple. There is about much of her life and her work something of the atmosphere that enveloped Jane Austen. Both women plunged into writing without advice, and the first that their friends knew of their literary ambitions was the finished and published book. Nor was the author of Pride and Prejudice more loyal to her art, more womanly in her ideals, more genuinely shrinking in her modesty than this American girl, who has been content to know the world through a lattice window sometimes overhung with Virginia creeper, or garlanded with Southern roses. Yet the strength of great oaks is in her work too.

There is less known about Miss Glasgow's personal side than most other successful and representative American women story tellers for the very reason that she was brought up in a strict Southern home, where women were remote from the hum of business and where the art of gentle living was genuinely cultivated. Perhaps this helps to make her achievement all the more notable. Certainly it has contributed a very rare and refining influence to her work. The wonder grows that this shy, sensitive girl should have been able to write a book like The Descendant in her early teens, for it is a tale of large experiences and big emotions. Only a few members of her family knew that she was writing this book. She would shut herself up in her room every day, and later join the family at their pleasures and diversions. Finally she went to her father and said:

"Father, I have written a book."

He was not only surprised, but almost dumbfounded. Others were astonished, too, and it will be recalled that when this novel appeared anonymously there was wide speculation over the authorship. The general impression was that it had been written by a man, and by a man of training and experience, too. I merely cite this incident to show Miss Glasgow's early method. She had published two books before she was twenty. Then came her first great popular success, The Voice of the People, in which she was clothed in her right name.

It was in this book that she first really declared her creed, for it was a story of the new South, of the blending of the fine old blue aristocratic strain with the more virile redder blood of the present day. She preserved the flower of old romance and grafted it to a hardier root. The result was really a new Southern literature.

There is much about politics in this book. As it grew she found that it was necessary to describe a State convention. Women in Virginia seldom mixed in politics; that was always left to the men. The suffragette cloud had not yet appeared on the horizon of the Old Dominion. But being an artist, she wanted to have this convention reported correctly. She took her sister into her confidence, and they in turn consulted an ancient family friend. He was a delegate to an approaching convention, and through him they were smuggled on the stage, where they sat in a dark and obscure corner on one of the hottest of

June days listening to a flood of Southern oratory no less fiery than the rays of the sun that beat on the tin roof. But she got the facts. When the story came out people marvelled at the accuracy of her descriptions and her knowledge of political conditions. Her sense of comprehension is little short of amazing. Had she gone into journalism she would have been a star reporter. The same is true of The Battleground, her war story. A celebrated British general recommended it to his men for reading, declaring that it was a remarkable analysis of civil war conditions.

Nothing is more characteristic of Miss Glasgow's feeling about American fiction than her approach to The Wheel of Life. Up to this time she had written mostly Southern stories and she had become as much identified with Virginia as Miss Wilkins with New England. She was regarded as the historian of a certain locality. She came to be referred to constantly as "a Southern writer." Now she was proud of all her Southern traditions and she came to them honestly. One day she said to me:

"I am going to write a novel of New York life."

"But why New York life when you know Virginia and the South so well?" I replied.

Instantly she answered:

"For the simple reason that art has no locality. It is universal. I do not believe that any writer should be confined to any particular locality."

She proved her point by writing a notable story of life in New York, and the only link it had with the South was one character, a young man who had come up from Virginia to make his way in the big city.

Having proved her point, she went back to the old scenes. That her insight had been quickened and her vision broadened she amply proved, first with The Ancient Law, and now with her new book, The Romance of a Plain Man. I venture the statement that no woman writing in America to-day has so sure a grasp of the new Southern conditions as Miss Glasgow. Instead of dabbling with an overthrown and broken regime whose chief pride perhaps was in its social prestige, she has dealt at first hand with big, vital, throbbing problems which the whole South has faced and is solving. Hers is the vision of big things.

It is really a strong man's work that she has cut out for herself, for it involves the mastery of the commercial and industrial awakening which means the restoration of the South's place in the whole undivided work of the nation.

Miss Glasgow comes to New York two or three times a year mainly to get a sense of contrast with the quiet conditions of her Virginia home. She has made many trips to Europe, but always manages to get back to Virginia to work. She lives in a square old white house on Main Street in Richmond. It is hemmed in by trees that cast shade over the soldiers of the Confederacy. Behind it is a garden where she walks and composes her story. Once more you get the touch of Jane Austen. She writes every morning and always behind a locked door. A door that is not locked has always given her a hint of possible intrusion. The only animate thing that has ever shared the comradeship of her work is her dog Joy. She writes rapidly and in a large masculine hand. In fact, her penmanship is no more effeminate than her work. Yet she has never lacked for sweetness of charm and lightness of touch where they were needed.

It is an old story, of course, that you can tell a man's or a woman's character by the few books they really love and keep beside them. On that little shelf where repose the volumes that Miss Glasgow loves and thumbs you will find Maeterlinck, Spinoza, Ruskin and the Bible. She has been tremendously interested for years in the literature of the Orient. There is a little brass Buddha on her desk and it has faithfully, if silently, supervised all her writing. If you will look carefully into what she has written you will find here and there the touch of Eastern mysticism, and the golden streak of East Indian philosophy.

There is something at once quickening and refreshing in a simple contemplation of Miss Glasgow's career. It seems a sort of thing apart in a time of blatant literary commercialism. Compared with "best selling" it is like contrasting a

violet with a Kansas sunflower; the human note of a violin with the blare of a brass band.

Dignity and distinction have marked her life and her work. Neither is replete with thrilling human interest, anecdotes or soul-stirring opinions on favourite foods or flowers. But with all the modesty of a high art she has made her way and at the same time, made some literature.