SOURCE: "Visions of Female Community in Ellen Glasgow's Ghost Stones," in Haunting the House of Fiction: Feminist Perspectives on Ghost Stories by American Women, edited by Wendy Kolmar and Lynette Carpenter, University of Tennessee Press, 1991, pp. 117-41.

In the following excerpt, Carpenter argues that Glasgow's ghost stories, which are particularly critical of men and sympathetic toward women, showcase her feminist concerns.

In 1916, with her father and closest sister recently dead, Ellen Glasgow returned to the family home in Richmond, Virginia, and entered into one of the most difficult periods of her life. She felt keenly the loss of her family, and the war played upon her imagination. Her physical and mental health worsened; she became even more painfully self-conscious about her deafness. She felt herself haunted by the ghosts of dead loved ones, as she described it later in The Woman Within: "Ghosts were my only companions. I...