Tomorrow is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859–1936

CHAPTER VI: Ellen Glasgow: The Perfect Mould

CHAPTER VI Ellen Glasgow The Perfect Mould Mary Johnston published Hagar in 1913. In the same year, Ellen Glasgow —who was to become by far the better-known writer—published her own study of southern womankind. While Hagar looked to the future , though, Virginia looked to the past to examine what Glasgowbelieved was a dying breed: the Southern Lady. Published in the year she turned forty, Virginia was Ellen Glasgow's tenth novel in nearly sixteen years. Yetits author claimed, and critics have often concurred, that it was the "first book of my maturity."Perhaps the recent death of her beloved sister and intellectual companion Gary, who was "closer to [her] than anyone else" and to whom Glasgow 226 T O M O R R O W IS ANOTHER DAY dedicated the novel, pushed her toward that maturity. Glasgowwrotein her memoir that she "used to think that [she] could never write another line if [she] were to lose her,"' yet write she did, and this was the novel. Perhaps, too, the artist's maturity came with her first full and conscious effort to exorcise the saint-figure of her mother in fiction, for, likeVirginia , Anne Jane Gholson Glasgow was "the perfect flower of Southern culture."2 Virginia's story shows the inevitable fading of that flower. Inescapably the victim of her own premises, Virginia banks all on love and loses: her loving parents die, her husband leaves her for another woman, and her children grow up and go away. Whether that saint was exorcised for all time represents one of the disagreements that Glasgow's name still provokes. It is her mother who, more than anyone else, gave to Ellen Glasgowa sense of the dying aristocratic South that some critics say she clung to sentimentally throughout her life, and others say she fought fiercely with her realism. Whatever the case, as late as 1944 Glasgow stood byher conscious belief that "everything in me, mental or physical, I owe to my mother" and that "I inherited nothing from [my father], except the color of my eyes and a share in a trust fund." In a famous bit of self-analysis, Glasgow added: "It is possible that from that union of opposites, I derived a perpetual conflict of types."3 Her parents were indeed of different and conflicting types. Francis Thomas Glasgow, born in western Virginia, came from Scottish and Irish ancestors. Settling in Rockbridge and Botetourt counties in the middle of the eighteenth century, the Glasgows and Andersons produced a state supreme court judge, Francis Thomas Anderson, and a successful pre-Civil War industrialist, General Joseph ReidAnderson, owner of the Tredegar Iron Worksin Richmond. Glasgow's father operated Tredegar from 1849 to 1912; during the Civil War, it became the Richmond Arsenal of the Confederacy. In a kinder moment than most, Ellen described her father as "stalwart, unbending, rock-ribbedwith Calvinism";4 for the most part, her memoir shows a man who, like Cyrus Treadwell in Virginia, lacked even a modicum of sensitivity. Ye as Marjorie R. Kaufman puts it, Disclaim this heritage though she might, Ellen Glasgowreceived more than financial independence from these [Glasgow and Anderson] men; she had also their business acumen , their competitiveness, their determination to succeed by creating a respectable productwhich could command recognition and a fair reward. . . . With [thesequalities]she was able to shepherd her reputation with the same attention that ELLEN GLASGOW 227 she gave her novels, and thus in the years before her death to enjoy the honor she had long felt her work deserved.5 Glasgow's mother, on the other hand, came from Tidewater aristocrats who thought Richmond far enough west to settle. An Episcopalian —her ancestor William Yates had been seventh president of William and Mary College and rector of Bruton Parish Church from 176164 —Anne Gholson had a genealogy that included some of the oldest colonial families of the state. When her mother died young and her father finally did move west, later to become a justice of the Ohio Supreme Court, Anne Gholson stayed in Richmond to be reared by her great-uncle, Chancellor Creed Taylor of the Superior Court of Law and Chancery, judge, commissioner of the University of Virginia, and founder of the law school at "Needham." Kaufman notes Glasgow'srelationship to her aristocratic mother: "The novelist's public image, which emerges from even the earliest interviews she gave the press and is supported by...