Books: Retreat to the Hills

VEIN OF IRON—Ellen Glasgow—Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

In the nine years since the Book-of-the-Month Club was founded, seven writers have had two novels chosen by it. Last week Ellen Glasgow moved into the exclusive company of Booth Tarkington, W. R. Burnett, Thames Williamson, Rosamond Lehmann, James Gould Cozzens, H. G. Wells and Vicki Baum—with an ambiguous, partly realistic, partly philosophical novel of three generations of Virginians, poor but cultivated folk who struggled to find some significance in the harrowing changes that swept their lives.

Ada Fincastle, sensitive, grey-eyed daughter of an unfrocked minister, inherited from her pioneer ancestors a stubborn courage that protected her from despair no matter what disasters engulfed her. Her memory of a poverty-oppressed childhood was a catalog of disappointments and perplexities. When she set her heart on a particular doll with real hair, her unworldly father, who wrote obscure books and corresponded with deep thinkers throughout the world, got her a cheaper one instead. And later, when she desperately needed help to save the man she loved, her father could only try to console her by repeating useless words of grave wisdom.

Strangely passive, Ada could think of no way to strike back when Janet Rowan, employing crude trickery and the threat of scandal, trapped Ralph McBride, who had planned to marry Ada. Ada waited, while Ralph’s hatred of his wife had at last reached a point where he could understand why men sometimes murder women. He could not get a divorce, but before he went away to war he and Ada found happiness in a hideaway in the mountains. Left in the small, nosy village, facing her strict religious grandmother, the taunts of the children in the street, Ada bore Ralph’s child. She moved to a Tidewater city, worked, learned to look with compassion on the struggles of her poor neighbors. Ralph returned and they were married, but a deep strain of war-created fatigue and despondency sapped his ambition, created a reserve that Ada could not understand, sometimes led him close to disaster. Unemployment destroyed their modest comfort, spread ruin in the families around them. They retreated to the hills they had left, new pioneers planning to build another life on the wreckage of the old.

The Author. Born in Richmond in 1874, Ellen Glasgow published her first novel, The Descendant, in 1897, has published 19 volumes since then. Of medium height, brown-eyed, slightly deaf, she lives in an old house in the heart of Richmond, writes in a garden hidden behind high shrubs and a forbidding iron fence, entertains visiting celebrities, is described by her friend James Branch Cabell as a grande dame of a rare and almost extinct type. Although The Romantic Comedians and They Stooped To Folly are among her more popular works, critical opinion is that none of her novels has measured up to Barren Ground, published ten years ago.