Читать книгу The Women Who Make Our Novels онлайн

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ELLEN GLASGOW’S first two books were produced before she was twenty. She is a Virginian, like Mary Johnston, but a realist—better, a disciple of naturalism—and concerned with social and personal problems of the last thirty years. A dozen books stand to her credit, all novels except a book of verse, nearly all concerned with the social reconstruction in the South. Banish the connotations of the word “Reconstruction” as used respecting the South. The period immediately following the end of the civil war is almost the sole property of Thomas Dixon. Miss Glasgow’s province for a number of years and a number of books has been the more gradual and more fateful making over of the South into something reasonably homogeneous with the rest of the United States than the leisured feudalism of the ’50s and the hopeless wreck of the ’60s.

She is a novelist of manners, but of changing manners; of cycles and transformations, whether in the lives of individuals or the life of a region. Unlike Miss Johnston, she cannot revive the past for its own sake, but only for the sake of the present and the future. She is an evolutionist who has not read Darwin and Herbert Spencer in vain. Her writing is filled with a serious purpose, the purpose to put life before you not merely as it is but as she thinks you should see it. She does not preach or moralize, being far too fine an artist for such crudities. It is enough to have given you the facts in her interpretation of them. She is quietly confident that you will not be able to get away from them, so presented. And you hardly ever are!