begins thus: "A girl in an orange-colored shawl stood at the window of Pedlar's store and looked through the falling snow, at the deserted road. Though she watched there without moving, her attitude in its stillness gave an impression of arrested flight, as if she were running toward life."
When I read that paragraph I said: "A cordial and gallant gesture! Ellen Glasgow in Richmond, Virginia, waves a handkerchief to Sinclair Lewis in Sauk Center, Minnesota. These girls, Mr. Lewis's Carol and Miss Glasgow's Dorinda, will not be Northern and Southern much longer. Regret it if you must, they are coming together in a common spirit. They are types of that sincerity and fearlessness which Ellen Glasgow declares mark the American democratic ideal, as grace and radiance marked the ideal of the old Virginian aristocracy."
For the moment, I am conniving at the benignant purpose of the publicity writer who tells us that with "Barren Ground" realism "at the last" crosses the Potomac. Waiving the question, for the moment, whether realism, at this crossing, is going south or going north, I heartily applaud the recognition of Miss Glasgow as a significant leader of contemporary realism. It is absurd to think of her as essentially a writer for the South, wholesomely irritant as she doubtless is to Southern slackness and ancestor-worship. It is high time that novel readers from Maine to California should become aware that she treats provincial life from a national point of view; that is, without sentimentality, without sectional prejudice or softness, with sympathy, understanding, passion and poetic insight, yet critically and with a surgical use of satire—in the spirit of the hour.
