Ellen Glasgow is a transitional figure in Southern American literature. Having rebelled against inhibiting traditions in her society, she was also impelled to rebel against the literature which expresses the values of that society: the romantically inspired or the cautiously realistic depictions of Southern life in writers such as Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, Mary N. Murfree, Mary Johnston, and James Lane Allen. She brought to the writing of Southern fiction the tenets of the late-nineteenth-century realism that was rooted aesthetically in the earlier theories and practice of Zola, Balzac, Maupassant, Flaubert, and the great English novelists--Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Meredith, and Hardy, and philosophically in Darwin and other evolutionary thinkers. The result was a corpus of novels that depicted more honestly the actualities of Southern history and experience than had heretofore been the rule. In effect, Ellen Glasgow introduced into Southern writing the predilections, preoccupations, and themes...