Virginia (1913)

Summary

Virginia Woodward Cloud, “Virginia Novel by Ellen Glasgow,” Baltimore News, 19 April 1913, p. 5

That which Miss Johnston has done for Virginia in her novels of its historical periods, Miss Glasgow has done in another, and even a more potent way, in her novels of its local life, placed at the time of, and since, the Civil War. These have been written with a serious art which has identified her with the few who have preserved the impressions of a rapidly changing and exceptionally significant period in the South.

Miss Glasgow is eminently strong in portraiture, and Virginia is at start a study of character, environment, and of the primitive life in a Virginia town during the eighties. But, while the majority of novels present to us life at a suspended moment of crisis or climax, with character at high or low ebb, photographed momentarily, we have it here as transitional, moving onward, with all its subtle change, which is the evidence of a finer and more delicate art.

Virginia, a Southern girl, in 1884, is not the overwritten and overemphasized coquette, besieged with suitors, and engaged to half a dozen, the latter is a type. Virginia is the individual-a product of good inheritances and traditions, too well accustomed to them to overvalue them. Normal, lovely, receptive, ready for the best in life, she innocently marries her “first love”-an enthusiastic young playwright, who means well but has not matured.