An Outline of American Literature

by Kathryn VanSpanckeren

The Rise of Realism: 1860-1914: Ellen Glasgow (1873-1945)

Glasgow was from Richmond, Virginia, the old capital of the Southern Confederacy. Her realistic novels examine the transformation of the South from a rural to an industrial economy. Mature works such as Virginia (1912) focus on the southern experience, while later novels like Barren Ground (1925) -- acknowledged as her best -- dramatize gifted women attempting to surmount the claustrophobic, traditional southern code of domesticity, piety, and dependence for women.

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