Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow was born in Richmond, Virginia, April 22, 1874, the daughter of Francis Thomas Glasgow and Anne Jane (Gholson) Glasgow. Her father belonged to a family of professional men—lawyers, judges, educators. The child was of delicate health. She never went to school—an admission she makes with a blush. An aunt used to tell her Scott’s stories at an age when Mother Goose is the customary intellectual fare. At thirteen she read and enjoyed Robert Browning. He is still her favorite poet, though Swinburne has a great place in her affections. Quite unaccountably Miss Glasgow showed a taste for scientific subjects. At eighteen she began “a systematic study of political economy and socialism.” Her love for a story remained strong. The home was a strict Southern home, the women in it were “sheltered.” The young woman would shut herself up in her room every day and later join the family for such diversions as they indulged in. Finally she went to her father and said:
“Father, I have written a book.”
Isaac F. Marcosson says that Father was dumbfounded, and well he might have been. The novel was published anonymously and was generally supposed to be the work of a man of training and experience. It was The Descendant, and it has been characterized as “a rather morbid exposition of the development and life of an intellectual hybrid, the offspring of a low woman and a highly intellectual man.”
The first book in which Miss Glasgow established her right to serious consideration as an American novelist—as a novelist picturing American life—was The Voice of the People, published in 1900. She has referred in after years to The Descendant as “a mere schoolgirl effort,” although it was not received as such, not by a long shot! But she could not so characterize The Voice of the People, nor could any one else. It is a competent picture of the Virginia of the ’80s with its class distinctions and its political maneuvering, framing a specific and dramatic story. The novel exhibits a considerable knowledge of political machinery and a characteristic tale relates how Miss Glasgow got some of the necessary “atmosphere.” In 1897 she drove over twenty miles in the hottest August weather in order to sit through two days of a Democratic State convention. An old family friend, a delegate to the convention, smuggled Miss Glasgow and her sister on to the stage of the opera house in which the sessions were held. They were the only women in the building and the ordeal of listening to two days of Southern oratory must have been as severe as the ordeal of sitting, obscurely and uncomfortably, in a sun-baked theater.
It is also said of Miss Glasgow that she remarked one day to a friend—Mr. Marcosson, if we are not mistaken: “I am going to write a novel of New York life.”
“But why New York life when you know Virginia and the South so well?”
“For the simple reason that art has no locality. It is universal. I do not believe that any writer should be confined to any particular locality.”
A reply which throws light on Miss Glasgow’s earnestness and seriousness of purpose. But she was, while entirely right in what she said, not answering the question. Art has no locality, but the artist has necessarily only a few localities—those he knows tolerably well. Miss Glasgow’s pictures of New York life never carry the conviction that her Virginia settings do.
Her own Virginia setting is a very lovely one. Number One West Main Street, Richmond, is a square old white house, “hemmed in by trees that cast shade over the soldiers of the Confederacy.” Behind it is a garden in which walks and composes a beautiful woman with red-gold hair, the real Titian shade or simply red-brown, as you may decide. It is wavy and has gold and copper gleams. “Once more you get the touch of Jane Austen,” explains Mr. Marcosson. He tells us that Miss Glasgow writes every morning and always behind a locked door; “a door that is not locked has always given her a hint of possible intrusion. The only animate thing that has ever shared the comradeship of her work is her dog, Joy. She writes rapidly and in a large, masculine hand.”
Rapidly, perhaps, but not finally. Nearly every bit of Virginia and Life and Gabriella was rewritten at least three times, some parts more; and one chapter was rewritten thirteen times. It sounds incredible, but Miss Glasgow says so herself. She used to write with a pen, but now does her first draft in pencil and revises after it has been typewritten.