Ellen Glasgow

She was Born in Richmond

Richmond is a town flowing with charm and sentiment. Last week the Confederate flag was flying on Monument Avenue, and the town was alive with scoldings and whisperings. John Drinkwater's Robert E. Lee had just played to generous audiences in the capital of the South, and the tumult and the shouting had not died. Protests came. Lee had not been so stout. His beard was silky. It was not bristly. Historical events were not thus and so. In the midst of this fluttering and chittering, I sought out the lovely old frame house where Ellen Glasgow lives. She was, it seemed, in New York City. So presently, having come back home again to New York City, I found Miss Glasgow on the eve of returning to Richmond. But I found her.

She is a spirited woman with great eagerness for the affair of the moment. She is at work on a new novel, to follow her The Shadowy Third, a recent volume of short stories. It is to be a Virginia story-- yes!--but beyond that she does not go--for it spoils a story to talk of it. When will it be finished? Well-- there is a year's work behind, and a year's, perhaps more, ahead. Who knows?

Miss Glasgow is one of the few realists in America who have succeeded in giving their work a touch of genuine poetry and quaintness of atmosphere. She knows thoroughly the towns and people of which she writes. She has studied their beauties as well as their peculiarities. Her rich humor and wistfulness give to her novels and stories a rare quality of humanity as well as quiet distinction.

Ellen Glasgow was born in Richmond. She is of the South; but she is not by any manner of means provincial. She was educated, being a delicate child, at home and at private schools. Yet she is by no means a woman secluded from life. She has wide contacts and interests. She talked as intelligently and appreciatively of Eleonora Duse's performance as she did of her favorite dog. Here is a really important figure in the history of American letters; for she has preserved for us the quality and the beauty of her real South.