SOURCE: "The Words for Invisible Things: The Short Stories (1916-1924)," in From the Sunken Garden: The Fiction of Ellen Glasgow, 1916-1945, Louisiana State University Press, 1980, pp. 53-78.

In the first sustained piece of criticism on Glasgow's short stories since Richard K. Meeker's 1963 essay, Raper argues that Glasgow's stories were written during a time of aesthetic and emotional crisis and reflect her search for a new language to express the workings of the deepest reaches of human consciousness.

The short stories of Ellen Glasgow have attracted little critical attention, aside from the introduction Richard K. Meeker wrote for The Collected Stories of Ellen Glasgow. This neglect exists in large part because the stories do not lend themselves to easy grouping. Glasgow scattered them through thirty years of her career. Some seem to be simple love stories while others are rather transparent ghost stories, and neither approach was typical of...