A lifelong Virginian, Glasgow portrayed the changing world of the contemporary South in a realistic manner, differing from the idealistic escapism that characterized Southern literature after Reconstruction.

[3] Due to poor health (later diagnosed as chronic heart disease), Glasgow was educated at home in Richmond, receiving the equivalent of a high school degree, although she read deeply in philosophy, social and political theory, as well as European and British literature.

Her mother, Anne Gholson, was inclined to what was then called "nervous invalidism"; which some attributed to her having borne and cared for ten children.

[8] Ellen Glasgow spent many summers at her family's Louisa County, Virginia, estate, the historic Jerdone Castle plantation, which her father bought in 1879, and would later use that setting in her writings.

[9] Her paternal great-grandfather, Arthur Glasgow, had emigrated with his brothers in 1776 from Scotland to the then-large and frontier Augusta County, Virginia.

Anderson was a major business and political figure in Richmond, who supported the Confederate States of America, joined the Army of Northern Virginia, and attained the rank of general.

Although it was published anonymously, her authorship became well known the following year, when her second novel, Phases of an Inferior Planet (1898), announced on its title page, "by Ellen Glasgow, author of The Descendant".

[19] The hero is a young Southerner who, having a genius for politics, rises above the masses and falls in love with a higher class girl.

[23] The novel portrays a romance built on the dramatic relationship between the hero and the heroine due to traditional class constraints.

[24] The genuine affection and reconciliation of the romance of the two were attempts by Glasgow to prove that "traditional class consciousness should be inconsequential to love affairs.

The Deliverance is notable for offering "a naturalistic treatment of class conflicts" that emerge after Reconstruction, providing realistic views of social changes in Southern literature.

[32] With The Romance of a Plain Man (1909) and The Miller of Old Church (1911) Glasgow began concentrating on gender traditions; she contrasted the conventions of the Southern woman with the feminist viewpoint,[33] a direction which she continued in Virginia (1913).

[36] Glasgow did not at first make women's roles her major theme, and she was slow to place heroines rather than heroes at the centers of her stories.

Written in response to her waning romantic relationship with Henry W. Anderson, Barren Ground is a story that chronicles the life events of the main heroine.

Glasgow reverses the traditional seduction plot by producing a heroine completely freed from the southern patriarchal influence and pits women against their own biological natures.

What endures in the novel is not the ideals of a cynical woman, but rather the landscape that is farmed by generations of humans who spend their brief time on earth on the land.

By writing Barren Ground, a "tragedy", she believed that she freed herself for her comedies of manners The Romantic Comedians (1926), They Stooped to Folly (1929), and The Sheltered Life (1932).

[42]Artistic recognition of her work may have climaxed in 1931 when Glasgow presided over the Southern Writers Conference at the University of Virginia.

[43] Glasgow produced two more "novels of character",[44] The Sheltered Life (1932) and Vein of Iron (1935), in which she continued to explore female independence.

By portraying the blatant injustices that black people face in society, Glasgow provides a sense of realism in race relations that she had never done before.

[47] The novel was quickly bought by Warner Brothers and adapted as a movie by the same name, directed by John Huston and released in 1942.

Copies of Glasgow's correspondence may be found in the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings papers at the George A. Smathers Libraries Special Collections at the University of Florida.

In The Woman Within (1954), an autobiography written for posthumous publication, Glasgow tells of a long, secret affair with a married man she had met in New York City in 1900, whom she called Gerald B.

However, the engagement occurred during the First World War, and Anderson, placed in charge of the Red Cross Commission in order to keep Romania on the side of the Allies, left for the country.

[57] By the end of her life, Glasgow lived with her secretary, Anne V. Bennett, 10 years her junior, at her home at 1 West Main Street in Richmond.