Volume 46, Number 20 · December 16, 1999
Unfinished Women
By Hermione Lee
Ellen Glasgow: A Biography
by Susan Goodman
Johns Hopkins University Press, 308 pp., $34.95
One of Ellen Glasgow's early novels, The Deliverance (published in 1904, when she was thirty-one, and set in the 1880s), has a remarkable minor character called Mrs. Blake. She is the widow of a man who went mad and died after the Civil War, when his land and house, handed down through two hundred years, were bought by the coarse and corrupt Bill Fletcher, who used to oversee his slaves. The Blake family have had to move into the overseer's house and make their living farming his tobacco fields. There is a bitter feud between Mrs. Blake's degraded, illiterate son Christopher—a Heathcliffian noble savage—and the overseer's family. Deliverance from the feud comes at last through Christopher's love for Fletcher's daughter.
Review, 4381 words
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