The Sheltered Life by Ellen Glasgow (Doubleday Doran, 1932)

 

I had vaguely heard of this author but didn't know much about her life and work.  I read about The Sheltered Life somewhere -- I think on a blog about books written by women -- and have had it on my shelf for a couple of years.  I'm glad I read it, for it's a beautifully written book about a well-off and socially prominent family living in Virginia (Richmond, I think, although it is called Queensbury in the book) in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

The first part is set in 1906, and after a short impressionistic interlude, the third part is set in 1916. In this formal way, as well as other stylistic and texturous ways, the book resembles Woolf's To the Lighthouse.  Both books are sharply bifurcated by time and follow the internal lives of many characters within a family and small community of friends.  And Glasgow's assured, intelligent, and lyrical writing often reminded me of Woolf's.

At the heart of The Sheltered Life is a tragic romance between a young girl and an older man.  Jenny Blair Archbald is 9 years old in the first section and about to turn 18 in the third; as both a young girl and as a young woman she has been powerfully charmed by George Songbird, a handsome neighbor who is married to Eva Birdsong.  Eva is a beautiful and charismatic women whom everyone adores, including George, although that does not stop him from being chronically unfaithful and thereby destroying the woman he so dearly loves.  Eva Birdsong is a  wonderful character -- a supreme creation.  Jenny Blair, along with her grandfather, her widowed mother, and her two aunts, who all live together down the street from the Birdsongs in a once-genteel but quickly fading neighborhood, observe the disintegration of the Birdsongs' marriage, and Jennie Blair's flirtatious infatuation with George, which he is unable to resist, hastens its tragic demise.

The rapidly changing world of the South, becoming less  genteel and stratified in the wake of the Civil War and the advent of the Industrial Revolution, is deftly suggested throughout the book.  Glasgow creates a world that is richly detailed and sensually evoked.  The book is longer than it needs to be and would have benefitted by a tighter editorial vision, but it's a rich and complex novel of wisdom and compassion.  I'm not surprised that Glasgow, a very fine writer, would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1941 for her novel In This Our Life.

 

Ellen Glasgow's house in Richmond, Virginia