circle. She builds her stories with a view to showing Time bringing in revenges.
Her style is firm, lucid, and if I were not afraid of giving offense, I should add, it has a masculine rhythm. It has wit and beauty. At its best it has a proud and impressive reserve, and goes over depths with the tension and moving stillness of deep rivers.
I have enumerated some of the talents and characteristics of Ellen Glasgow which have impressed me in reading these novels. As I turn away from the "specimens" of her qualities, which I have collected but have not space to exhibit, I ask myself wherein the abiding value of her work lies; what is the nature of the pervasive presence in her world which has rewarded me for entering it. And the reply which comes first to my lips is this: her wisdom, the breadth and justice of her vision.
But I have scarcely uttered that characterization when I recognize that, after all my enumeration of qualities, I have failed to bring out the really distinguishing marks of her individuality. I have said nothing of her daimonic element, her iconoclasm, her affectionate derision of the old South, her tireless satire upon the self-immolating old-fashioned female with faded roses in her cheeks and dying violets in her eyes, her merciless incessant mockery at the ancient egotistical pretensions of the male sex, and, deeper than all, underlying all, the realistic drive of her nature toward the discovery of ends which shall make life for men and women, but especially for women, somehow not wholly unworthy of the brief candle which lights them into the long darkness.
Ellen Glasgow is passionate. With all the passionateness of her soul she hates lies, and she hates
