failure. If her realism has not been as popular as the romances of some of our practising novelists it is because she is modern with a vengeance. She is a feminist with a vengeance. If you review her novels you find that for the last twenty-five years she has been steadily insisting that the average woman is a failure, and that the average woman's life is founded on a lie, a vital illusion, namely, that the sexual attraction which draws her to her man in the mating season is enough, is her supreme and sufficient affair with life. With all her humor, with all her wit and wisdom, and with all her passion, she asserts and reasserts that this is not enough. In one form of words or another, through novel after novel, runs this refrain: "There ought to be something more permanent than love for one to live by." Through novel after novel, with an insistence most abasing to masculine conceit, she exhibits the evanescence of sexual passion, exhibits women of all sorts who are quite disillusioned about love, exhibits men in the humiliating and bewildering attitude of loving without return, and loving when they are loved no more.
One doesn't get all of Ellen Glasgow's qualities at their highest in "Barren Ground." It is more somber than most of the others, less relieved by wit. It is insistently grim; and it has, I think, needless longueurs in its last hundred pages. Still it remains an excellent example of her talent, and it contains a powerful development of her central thesis.
Dorinda running toward life is embraced by it, seductively, treacherously. The terror and pathos of her disillusion are developed in pages of memorable beauty. Elsewhere Miss Glasgow has mockingly painted old maids of the Victorian mold who have sat
