SOURCE: "Ellen Glasgow's Outline of History in The Shadowy Third and Other Stories," in The Critical Response to H. G. Wells, edited by William J. Scheick, Greenwood Press, 1995, pp. 125-38.

In the following essay, Rainwater asserts that Glasgow's Gothic stories were influenced by the works of H. G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe.

In several letters in her autobiography, The Woman Within (1954), Ellen Glasgow mentions reading the works of Poe and Wells.¹ In contemplating these two authors' works, she joined what has now become a wide network of writers whose art bears complex intertextual connections centering around a mutual literary debt to Poe and, frequently, also to one another.² Glasgow admits to feeling a "curious . . . kinship with Poe,"³ and although she calls Wells's novels "dull" (WW 203), she owned at least five of them along with an early edition of The Outline of History (1920). Apparently, she found the Outline...