SOURCE: Gray, Richard. “‘To Escape from the Provincial’: Ellen Glasgow, the Matter of Virginia, and the Story of the South.” In Southern Aberrations: Writers of the American South and the Problems of Regionalism, pp. 36-95. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000.

In the following excerpt, Gray addresses historical and biographical elements at work in the early fiction of Ellen Glasgow.

Ellen Glasgow was reluctant to think of herself as a Southern writer. She wanted, she declared, “to escape … from the provincial to the universal;” and her subject was human nature in the South, not the Southern nature. Like Poe, however, she was happy to claim the role of Virginian. “I am a Virginian,” she once declared, “in every drop of my blood and pulse of my heart.” And, unlike Poe, that claim was relatively easy to defend. She was, after all, born in the heart of the former...