One Man in His Time (1922)

Summary

Hunter Stagg, “The Virginia Scene,’ New York Tribune, 21 May 1922, sec. 5, p. 6

As Carl Van Doren points out in his new book, Contemporary American Novelists, Ellen Glasgow is the one Southern writer who, beginning as a local colorist, with narratives of the Civil War and Reconstruction times, has yet “emerged from the level established by the majority,” and ranged herself with fresher literary models and ideals.

She has accomplished the feat of remaining as faithful to her background as any Thomas Nelson Page, while steadily acquiring toward it an attitude shrewdly critical. Thus, in her later novels, pre-eminently in Virginia, she paints with warmth and fullness the atmospheric conventions and still active traditions of her scene, but plays the bitter lights of irony and glamourless pathos upon the people who confront life with only such defenses as those conventions and traditions can supply.

Having already developed from a local colorist into a type of ironist, much needed in the South, Miss Glasgow sounds in her latest novel, One Man in His Time, still another note, of which the chances are equal that it represents yet another milestone in her development or merely a passing phase. In either case the note is less one of literary than personal reaction. Her sanely critical records of the conflict between the old and the new always displayed a trust, unusual in a Virginia writer, in the new.