Ellen Glasgow Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Edgar MacDonald

Critical Essay by Edgar MacDonald

SOURCE: "From Jordan's End to Frenchman's Bend: Ellen Glasgow's Short Stories," in Mississippi Quarterly: The Journal of Southern Culture. Special Issue: Ellen Glasgow, Vol. XLIX, No. 2, Spring, 1996, pp. 319-32.

In the following essay, MacDonald suggests that Glasgow's uneasy friendship with her one-time fiancé Henry Anderson unconsciously informs the themes of many of her short stories.

¹ One of the best things to happen to Ellen Glasgow was Henry Anderson. In her earlier fiction she had juxtaposed the virile self-made man and the effete aristocrat, her heroines usually giving their hearts to the former but marrying the latter. Now here under her minute scrutiny was an exemplar of both fictional males, a well-born man who had not gone to seed but had risen from the ashes of Reconstruction and like a good Virginian had reverted to being an "Englishman," very much as her brother Arthur Glasgow had done. She...
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