Ellen Glasgow, A Biography.

Wagner-Martin, Linda

Ellen Glasgow, A Biography, by Susan Goodman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. xii, 308 pp. $34.95 cloth.

ELLEN GLASGOW IS ONE OF AMERICA'S VENERABLE writers (albeit a consistent best-seller) whose reputation is in need of a fix. From her position during the first forty years of the twentieth century as the woman of United States letters, vying for that title only with "Mrs. Wharton," she has come to a nadir where some rare book dealers won't even handle her books.

The enigma of the decline of Glasgow's reputation has been addressed in several ways. It is sometimes said that she wrote of a South so circumscribed by tradition that her portraiture--though deft--seems, today, nostalgic. The dangers of being a chronicler of the South come home to roost for the respected woman writer who remained respectful of the conventions of the South she knew so well. Unlike the work of William Faulkner, Glasgow's writing was seldom obviously critical, and rarely troubling.

More often, however, Glasgow is grouped with the other successful women novelists who were her contemporaries--Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. Within the past two decades, the received literary wisdom has been that the prize-winning biography of Wharton by R. W. B. Lewis reestablished Wharton as an ambivalently skillful novelist, whose texts often said things they might not have appeared to mean. Today's readers liked them for that ambivalence, and for a generous complexity. Followed by further important studies by Cynthia Griffin Woolf and Shari Benstock, the Lewis book was credited with whetting new interest in Wharton and her work. The various film versions of her novels have only added to that general reader interest.

The same kind of biographical nexus may have propelled Cather into prominence once more. A later moment-of-truth occurred when the publication of James Woodress's full Cather study intersected with the first volume of Sharon O'Brien's biography (in which she defined the term lesbian as she used it to describe Cather's fiction). Controversy over applying that categorization, however it was to be defined, led to countless essays, editions, and reviews of both Cather and her work.

In contrast, during these same decades, only a loyal handful of Glasgow scholars continued their work. Bereft of any visible drama, Glasgow studies languished. Intrigued by the biographical controversies, teachers used the texts of either Wharton or Cather, and Glasgow studies continued to languish.

Until 1998. Then the appearance of Susan Goodman's Ellen Glasgow, A Biography began to lead readers to the surprisingly feminist novels (perhaps more feminist than most novels by either Wharton or Cather), and to Glasgow's surprisingly feminist life. Unmarried by choice, Glasgow wrote with authority about heterosexual romance: some of her strongest women characters are, in fact, happily married.

Others, however, who are drawn as being every bit as happy, lead independent--and often professional--lives. Glasgow's women do work, something of a rarity in early twentieth-century fiction: they farm, work in businesses and offices, read books about working, and generally conduct themselves like professionals.

What Ellen Glasgow has provided readers are literary works that inscribe, and reinscribe, the choices she herself was making throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The knowledge of her life, in tandem with her fiction, which Goodman's biography provides--though never in a simple one-to-one correspondence--makes the pattern of the woman writer who was also leading a woman's life indelible.

What is perhaps most impressive about Goodman's biography is that she has avoided turning Glasgow into the victim that some readers might find her to have been (though never the view of Glasgow herself). With even-handed precision, Goodman avoids the sensational--even if Ellen was often ill, pampered in that illness by being allowed to stay out of school; increasingly deaf from her adolescence on; and so angered by her father's long-term affair with a mulatto servant that she stopped going to church, and so pained by her mother's heartbreak and collapse that she destroyed her first novel manuscript. We as readers of this biography are given instead Glasgow's more interior drama. Goodman--rightly, I think--narrates Glasgow's bereavement when her favorite brother-in-law commits suicide in a New York hotel room several years after he marries Cary, Ellen's closest sister (and by doing so, becomes Ellen's tutor and mentor). Her loss here is both intellectual and emotional.

Without belaboring the years Glasgow spent in her illicit love affair with a married man, Goodman emphasizes what such a liaison meant to the conventional Southern gentlewoman that Glasgow was trained to be, and what the risk of following her passion truly meant to her family standing. The biographer also treats almost matter-of-factly other suicides, deaths, and bereavements--keeping clear her primary focus, on Ellen herself, the little sister who was forced to be strong, and who early learned that any survival demanded such personal strength.

As a helpful introduction to the wide range of Glasgow's fiction, as well as a deft and well-paced narrative of the writer's life, Goodman's book is one of the most useful biographies of the late nineties. Only the second such treatment of Glasgow's life, it will remain the standard, probably for many decades to come.

Linda Wagner-Martin University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill