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Chapter 7 Ellen Glasgow’s THE BATTLE-GROUND When all is said, the arteries in the intellect are as essential to literature as the arteries in the body are essential to life. Of this I was thinking many years ago when I said that the South needed blood and irony. Blood it needed because Southern culture had strained too far away from its roots in the earth; it had grown thin and pale; it was satisfied to exist on borrowed ideas, to copy instead of create. And irony is an indispensable ingredient of the critical vision; it is the safest antidote to sentimental decay. —Ellen Glasgow1 In 1938, Ellen Glasgow published a critical preface to The Battle-Ground in which she explained that her intent in writing her only Civil War novel had been “to portray the last stand in Virginia of the aristocratic tradition.” With her admission, Glasgow acknowledged that “this inherited culture possessed grace and beauty and the inspiration of gaiety.” She also claimed, however, that the tradition was “shallow-rooted at best,” flawed by its dependence “not upon its own creative strength, but upon the enforced servitude of an alien race,” and she concluded that “economic necessity doomed the South to defeat” since it could not survive “industrial conquest” (Certain Measure 13). Glasgow wrote these words separated by a distance of 36 years from the original publication of The Battle-Ground, as well as a distance of more than 70 years from the war that she had depicted in the novel, a war that had concluded with the South’s defeat eight years before her birth in 1873. Raised in Richmond, Virginia, Glasgow was a child of Reconstruction and the New South. All she knew about the war and the way of life that preceded it, she learned from the recollections of others and her own research. 142 Novels from the “Redeemed” South Through her upbringing, however, and especially through the influence of her parents, Glasgow had developed an early understanding of the conflicting ideologies of the old and new South. Her refined and emotionally fragile mother was a descendent of the Virginia Tidewater aristocracy, while her stern Scotch-Irish father was a rising businessman in the ironmaking industry. By virtually all accounts, Glasgow, who was the eighth of ten children, “identified with her gentle, Episcopalian mother and rejected her stern, Presbyterian father , but readers of her novels recognize the influence of both strains—cavalier and puritan—on her fiction as well as on her personality” (Scura, Introduction, Ellen Glasgow xi). Although she steadfastly refused to acknowledge her father’s influence, even she grudgingly admitted in her posthumously published autobiography , “[I]t is possible that from that union of opposites, I derived a perpetual conflict of types. Even in childhood, my soul was a battleground for hostile forces of character, for obscure mental and emotional antagonisms” (Woman Within 16). Her sentimental tie to tradition came from her mother, while her fierce independence and intellect derived from her father. As a young child, she dearly loved her “black mammy,” Lizzie Jones, but she also came to recognize the wrongs of slavery, much as her father had when he freed his own slaves before the war began.2 Although she had little formal education, Glasgow loved to read and began writing when she was only seven years old. As she later explained, “At the age of seven my vocation had found me. . . . I was born a novelist, though I formed myself into an artist. . . . Always I have had to learn for myself, from within” (Woman Within 41). Without mentors or training , she learned by her own early mistakes, taking a number of years to develop her first novel, The Descendant, which she published anonymously in 1897. Her mother’s death when Glasgow was 20 was a shattering blow to the young author, who by this time was also suffering from deafness, which hampered her social interactions with others for the rest of her life.3 Caring for her father faithfully, if without affection, until his death in 1916, Glasgow never married, although she was engaged at least twice and romantically involved with other men, including one married man whose identity has never been confirmed. She traveled extensively to New York and Europe and despised being thought of as merely a southern or provincial writer, but Richmond remained her home by choice. From this home base, living in the same house from 1888 until her death in 1945, Glasgow published...

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