Because she believes so much in the novel form, Miss Glasgow has never written a play nor ever consented to the dramatization of any of her books. “I like the flow of the novel,” she says. “It is the best expression of the people and the times. The drama cannot comprehend all of life as it is to-day. A larger canvas is needed to picture the greater complexity. The greatest drama was written in times when life was far more simple than it is now. The novel alone can take in its flow all of this complexity.”
Add to Miss Glasgow’s literary tastes Maeterlinck, Spinoza, Ruskin and the Bible. She was for years “tremendously interested” (Mr. Marcosson’s words) in the literature of the Orient. There is a little brass Buddha on her desk in the house in Richmond. The fatalistic touch, or more accurately, the sense of the law of recompense and the payments life is always exacting, pervades her stories. Certain ideas are for her garbed in definite phrases. Take, for example, the titles of two of her books, The Wheel of Life (1906) and The Ancient Law (1908). They merely repeat the titles of the final chapter and the final book, respectively, in her earlier novel, The Deliverance.
For some years Miss Glasgow has divided her time between her Richmond home and a pleasant New York apartment overlooking Central Park, an apartment which somehow, with its books, its portrait of Miss Glasgow empaneled, its white pillars at the entrance to the reception room, its books, books, books in mahogany cases, preserves a good deal of the atmosphere of a Southern home. Miss Glasgow comes to New York “for the change,” and also to get the life of New York which has alternated with the life of Virginia in her later books.
Virginia, as her most popular book and the cause of a considerable controversy on its appearance in 1913, must receive some attention in this sketch. It is the first book of a trilogy—provided Miss Glasgow writes the third! Life and Gabriella was the second book of the uncompleted trilogy. Let us see what Miss Glasgow has had to say about these books. We assume that the reader knows her to have been an ardent suffragist and advocate of economic independence for her sex.
“Success for a woman” (Miss Glasgow is speaking) “must be about the same as for a man. Success for a woman means a harmonious adjustment to life. Material success is not success if it does not also bring happiness.
“The great thing in life is the development of character to a point where one may mold his destiny. One must use the circumstances of life rather than be used by them. The greatest success for a woman is to be the captain of her own soul.
“Women have always been in revolt.” (This in answer to a question as to whether Life and Gabriella was intended to express the modern revolt of women.) “It is only now that the revolt is strong enough to break through the crust. No matter what her condition or class, woman does not now have to marry for support, because she is ashamed to be unmarried, or because she is hounded to it by her relatives. She dare remain single.
“I believe that marriage should be made more difficult and divorce easier. I also believe that divorce laws should be made more uniform. Laws made for traffic and commercial ends may need to be changed when a certain arbitrary boundary is passed, but laws made for human nature should be everywhere the same, for the man who lives in California and the one in Maine are—just men.
“The mistake women, wives, have always made is that they have concentrated too intensely on emotion. They have made emotion the only thing in the world. Husband and wife must be mentally companionable if their happiness is to last through the years.
“I find one of the most fascinating dramas in all the facets of life to be the great epic of changing conditions and the adjustment of individuals to the new order. Naturally the battle is always sharpest and most dramatic in those places where the older system has been most firmly intrenched. And that is why the coming of the new order in the South has been attended by so many dramatic stories. When I began Virginia I had in mind three books dealing with the adjustment of human lives to changing conditions.