Obviously what the writer of that paragraph wishes to have us believe is that Ellen Glasgow is in the strictly contemporaneous larger movement of American fiction. Not the little whirl and eddy of merely fashionable writers who prove their superiority and their "sophistication" by being sick of everything, but that movement which records with stark honesty the adventures of upgirt, courageous young Americans of the middling sort, wrestling with the dark angel of their destiny and murmuring between clenched teeth: "I will not let thee go till thou bless me."
Right again. "Barren Ground" is an expression of the realest thing in American life. It is an expression of the indomitable fighting spirit, the will to live, the desire to be free, the passion for progress and mastery, the determination to bite through to some faint sweetness in the fruit of life, though the fruit be only an osage orange. This is a cluster of fighting virtues which every one fit to speak of the sturdier American stock knows are in hot, eager tumult beneath the cynical and insouciant manners of the hour.
Symbols. In 1920, a writer who immensely accelerated this realistic movement began a well known novel with these words: "On a hill by the Mississippi where Chippewas camped two generations ago, a girl stood in relief against the cornflower blue of Northern sky. . . . She lifted her arms, she leaned back against the wind, her skirt dipped and flared, a lock blew wild. A girl on a hilltop; credulous, plastic, young; drinking the air as she longed to drink life. The eternal aching comedy of expectant youth."
Ellen Glasgow begins "Barren Ground" at almost the same point and on almost the same note. She
