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During the past decade, the fiction and autobiography of Ellen Glasgow (1873-1945) have been undergoing major reevaluation - especially from critics engaged in issues of gender. This collection of essays, in which feminist viewpoints figure prominently, marks a significant contribution to this new dialogue on Glasgow's work. "For many years," Dorothy M. Scura observes, "Glasgow was regarded as a transitional figure in southern letters, a writer who published books in the time between Thomas Nelson Page and William Faulkner. She was an outsider, an anomaly, a Virginian who did not quite fit the context of the Southern Literary Renaissance." Recent feminist criticism, however, has heightened interest in Glasgow by revealing her intense concern with the role of women in society and with the values of patriarchal culture. Using a variety of critical approaches - including semiotic, intertextual, and biographical - these fifteen essays cover the full range of Glasgow's writings, from well-known novels such as Virginia, Barren Ground, and The Sheltered Life to less familiar works such as The Battle-Ground, The Wheel of Life, the verse collected in The Freeman and Other Poems, and the short stories. Of special value is the volume's inclusion of a newly discovered short story, "Ideals," as well as a selection of previously unpublished letters by Glasgow to her friend and fellow writer Louise Chandler Moulton.
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