SOURCE: "The Years of the Locust," in Ellen Glasgow: Beyond Convention, University of Texas Press, 1982, pp. 50-70.

In the following excerpt, Wagner maintains that Glasgow's short stories emphasize characterization—particularly strong women characters—rather than plot development and experiment with ideas subsequently integrated in her novels.

For all Glasgow's earlier reticence about focusing on women protagonists, she draws a variety of effective female characters in her stories. As Richard K. Meeker points out in his introduction to the collected stories, many of these women prefigure characters from the later novels.²⁵ Perhaps more significant at this period of Glasgow's career, the stories gave her a means of drawing numerous different women. Many of these female characters were quite changed from her earlier protagonists, and, accordingly, served as exploration for some characters who might meet the cultural obstacles with those more "indirect" methods of which she had spoken in 1916, those...