“In Virginia I wanted to do the biography of a woman, representative of the old system of chivalry and showing her relation to that system and the changing order. Virginia’s education, like that of every well-bred Southern woman of her day, was designed to paralyze her reasoning faculties and to eliminate all danger of mental unsettling. Virginia was the passive and helpless victim of the ideal of feminine self-sacrifice. The circumstances of her life first molded and then dominated her.
“Gabriella was the product of the same school, but instead of being used by circumstances, she used them to create her own destiny. The two books are exact converses. Where Virginia is passive, Gabriella is active.
“Virginia desired happiness, but did not expect it, much less fight for it, and consequently in a system where self-sacrifice was the ideal of womanhood she became submerged by circumstances just as have been so many other women of her type. Gabriella, on the other hand, desired happiness and insisted on happiness. Gabriella had the courage of action and through molding circumstances wrested from life her happiness and success.”
“And the third book?” The reader must not think from the condensed and coalesced extracts of what Miss Glasgow has said about her work that she talks readily. She does not. You have, sometimes, rather to drag it out of her—that is, what you want concerning her own work. On literature generally she talks with freedom, wisdom and point.
“The third book may never be written,” Miss Glasgow answered. “If it should be, it will deal with a woman who faces her world with the weapons of indirect influence or subtlety.”
Gabriella’s philosophy was summed up in her words: “I want to be happy. I have a right to be happy, and it depends on myself. No life is so hard that you can’t make it easier by the way you take it.” In the face of disaster which would have broken the hearts of many women, she won her success, her happiness, from the cruelties of life.
“I believe,” Miss Glasgow once said, “that a person gets out of life just what he puts into it—or rather he puts in more than he gets out, I suppose; for he is always working for something unattainable; always groping vaguely with his spirit to find the hidden things. Gabriella, as you may remember, was ‘obliged to believe in something or die.’”
We have heard Miss Glasgow tell how she lives with a character. She is, or was, living with the character which will become the central figure in the third novel of her probable trilogy. “The time is not ripe to write,” she said, when last speaking about this possible book. “As soon as I begin to speak of the character it all leaves me. For some years I wrote one book every two years. Three years elapsed between Virginia and Life and Gabriella. I have no idea when the next will be finished. I cannot understand how any one can finish and publish two books a year regularly. It seems that one ought to give more of one’s self to a book than that. For my own part, I should like to write each novel and keep it ten years before I publish it. But my friends tell me, ‘Of course, that is impossible. You change so much in ten years—all would be different. You would be obliged to write it all over again.’ I suppose that is true.”
Very true. But the dissatisfaction with the ten-year-old novel would be the dissatisfaction of the conscientious artist, Ellen Glasgow. It would not be the dissatisfaction of the novel reader. At least, re-reading The Deliverance these fourteen years after its first publication, your admiration for Miss Glasgow’s finished art, her sense of drama, her penetration of the human heart, her portraitive skill, her fine sense of the retributive conscience implanted in the human breast—all these blended perceptions and satisfactions are as lively as they were when the book first came out. Really the only difference is that now you look confidently for them and are, though no less rejoiced and grateful, not in the least surprised at the finding.
Miss Glasgow’s peculiar brilliance has never received a more honest or better tribute than in what Gene Stratton-Porter had to say after reading Virginia. It is worth quoting in full: