SOURCE: "Fiction of the War Years and After," in Ellen Glasgow and the Ironic Art of Fiction, University of Wisconsin Press, 1960, pp. 127-45.

In this excerpt from the first book-length study of Glasgow's oeuvre, McDowell dismisses all but two of her short stories as insignificant.

Miss Glasgow seems to have needed the leisured form of the novel to develop her characters and situations, so that, as a short story writer, she is not particularly adept.¹² With two exceptions her stories, collected in The Shadowy Third and Other Stories (1923), are negligible because in this form she turned primarily to an investigation of the supernatural, an inquiry which did not consort well with her predominantly realistic bent of mind. Most of the stories deal with the occult, but too baldly and literally. The subtlety which frequently distinguished Miss Glasgow's studies of moral conflict and of the manners of the aristocracy...