THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 7, 1996 TAG: 9601110545
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY BERNICE GROHSKOPF
LENGTH: Medium: 78 lines
VEIN OF IRON
ELLEN GLASGOW
The University Press of Virginia, 408 pp. $14.95. paper.
Although many of Ellen Glasgow's books were best sellers during her lifetime, she said she cared more about the opinion of posterity than that of her contemporaries. But posterity has scarcely noticed her, while works of her fellow writers, such as William Faulkner, T.S. Eliot, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, to name a few, continue to be read.
Glasgow has, nevertheless, earned a place in American literary history as one of the first Southern realists. Born in Richmond in 1873, she grew up when the South was recovering from the Civil War, and died in 1945 having lived through two world wars and the Depression. Vein of Iron, which Glasgow considered her ``best and truest work,'' the culmination of her philosophy, is a historical and social document of the Old Dominion in the early 20th century. It was published in 1935.
The central character, Ada Fincastle, is a young woman whose vein of iron, inherited from her foremothers, enables her to face a life of hardships. And Ada faces more than her share, maintaining throughout a determined optimism and a steadfast faith in Ralph, a young man of weak character whom she loves. While Ada provided the stability and strength he needs, he is incapable of satisfying her longing for reassurance of his love.
Ada's father, a defrocked minister who has become ``one of the greatest among living philosophers,'' is drawn as a self-effacing man who writes late into the night, and has a small appetite, but the reader is never convinced of his brilliance as a philosopher.
The author's strength lies in her methodical, meticulously detailed accounts of the South before, during and after World War I, with a particularly graphic picture of the grinding struggle for survival during the Depression. She comments on hospital conditions, the indifference of doctors and nurses, the stupidity and selfishness of people, the loss of ``common decency,'' the gangs, the violence - criticisms that might be applied to the present day. But her tendency to moralize and lecture often slackens the forward thrust of the story, as does her painstaking but overworked prose style.
In 1920, H.L. Mencken, who considered the South a cultural desert, named James Branch Cabell the single Southern writer of merit, but the Southern literary renaissance emerged with Glasgow who began publishing in 1897. Abandoning traditional romantic images of the Old South, she began, in her words, a ``revolt against the formal, the false and affected, the sentimental and the pretentious in Southern writing.''
Thus she provided an accurate social and cultural history of her region. She was especially concerned with the role of women in the custom-bound South, a subject she addressed in a succession of novels. She reveals how few were the options for unmarried women in Barren Ground, a novel she regarded as a ``vehicle of liberation.''
The Romantic Comedians, an ironic comedy, explores the theme of the foolish man searching for romantic love, finding the equally foolish waiting woman. The consequences of rearing young Southern women as innocents is the subject of The Sheltered Life.
By the time Glasgow had completed Vein of Iron, her 18th novel, she was in her 60s and had received numerous awards. Despite failing health, she went on to write the Pulitzer Prize-winning In This Our Life. Although her life as an independent career woman was considered inappropriate at that period, she remained unmarried, continuing her successful career, living in the family home in Richmond, One West Main, except for five years, 1911-1916, when she lived in New York.
The reissue of Vein of Iron by The University Press of Virginia comes after reissuances of The Sheltered Life, The Romantic Comedians and her autobiography, The Woman Within. MEMO: Bernice Grohskopf is a free-lance book reviewer in Charlottesville who
specializes in 19th century British literature. by CNB