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This chapter analyzes irony as a specifically gendered figure with political implications by showing the role played by irony in the work of G.W.F. Hegel and Richard Rorty, which subsequently reveals a 1906 short story titled “The Birth of Irony” as a central example of irony’s gender politics. The chapter does so to reveal American novelist Ellen Glasgow’s immensely popular novel The Romantic Comedians (1926) as emblematic of a cultural and political context that includes the pragmatism of William James and key episodes from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned (1922) and Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926). While irony re-emerged as a central analytical term for 1990s feminist theorists, Glasgow offers a radical feminist riposte to the persistent myth of the “unironic woman” from within popular modernist culture itself.

“A Letter and a Dream” examines the letters exchanged between Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Ellen Glasgow during their lives, as well as correspondences written by the two authors about one another to mutual acquaintances. The chapter focuses primarily on the dream Rawlings shared with Glasgow, signifying the depth of their friendship. “A Letter and a Dream” also explores the adulation of Rawlings for Glasgow in the letters written after Glasgow’s death, many of which focus on her biographical research.

In her posthumously published, fictionalized memoir, Blood of My Blood, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings provides a scathing account of her relationship with her mother, along with the details of her childhood. Rawlings delved just as deeply into the familial relationships of Ellen Glasgow when researching her biography. Contrasting the two writers’ similar feelings of connection and estrangement with their parents and their complex relationships with siblings, it is clear that family experiences compelled them to write, even as those same experiences hindered their writing careers. Even though there is no indication that the two women discussed their parents, their lives indicate a remarkable similarity in overcoming family trials to succeed in writing careers that were considered by some to be unconventional.

“The Sheltered Life” looks at Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Ellen Glasgow’s attempts to sustain romantic attachments while maintaining their success as writers. Rawlings spent much of her time in Richmond interrogating friends and relations about Glasgow’s romantic relationships, especially her confirmed engagement to Henry Anderson. Rawlings herself was married to Norton Baskin after her initial marriage to Charles Rawlings fell apart over their volatile tempers and professional jealousies. Glasgow never married and found it difficult to sustain her romantic affairs for any length of time. Both women prioritized their professional lives as writers over romantic attachments and were regularly frustrated by their partners’ inability to understand their lives as writers.

“In Search of Truth, Not Sensation” examines the critical reception both Ellen Glasgow and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings encountered and explores how they each dealt with critical reception, namely being classified as regional writers or writers of juvenilia. This chapter focuses on their discussions with one another and about one another’s works to defend and define “regionalism” to literary critics and book reviewers.

Chapter 7 builds upon the activism of Ellen Glasgow and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings to critique their oftentimes conflicting views of race, class, and gender through their literature, nonfiction writing, and correspondences. This chapter reveals how Glasgow and Rawlings struggled to maintain traditional values and an attachment to an older, more naturalistic lifestyle while embracing the more modern views of social justice that such lifestyles often overlooked.

“A Certain Measure of Achievement” looks at the many book reviews and clippings on Ellen Glasgow’s major works collected by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings when working on her biography and compares them with similar reviews of Rawlings’s major works. This chapter considers the ways in which their responses to one another’s literature helped to further Rawlings and Glasgow’s friendship, while underscoring their shared literary values. Glasgow and Rawlings clearly saw pieces of their own experiences and worldviews in their respective works. This chapter also establishes, through criticism, the literary identities of both authors.

“Women Who Will—Do” catalogues the nonfiction writings by Ellen Glasgow and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings that detail their shared interest in social activism. Many of these writings were included in the material collected by Rawlings for the Glasgow biography or shared in correspondences between the two women writers. This chapter focuses on Rawlings’s interest in conservationism and Glasgow’s work with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA). Both women found ways to use their fame and wealth to influence others about the social issues they supported.

The afterword is an overview of the unique and supportive friendship between Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Ellen Glasgow. When Rawlings befriended Glasgow, she found inspiration in their paralleled experiences with the writing process and those “wells” of creativity they constantly needed to refill through introspection and periods of rest or distraction. Their relationship was not the only one of its kind, but it was one of the great literary friendships in the South, and it needs to be recognized and studied for its influential mark on both women and on their writing.

The tension between gender determinism and feminism increased after World War I, and works by black and white southern women writers set during the war often portray women characters as alternately challenging the patriarchal order and defending it as they attempt to negotiate the disruptions of modernity. This chapter explains how the war disrupted established gender roles in the South, analyses how African American Women writers wavered between Victorian propriety and impulses toward social transgression, traces the expansion and contraction of women’s agency in novels by Ellen Glasgow and Elizabeth Madox Roberts, and describes the new southern women trope that emerged after the war in novels by Frances Newman and Zelda Fitzgerald. Southern gender roles are a social fiction, and modernist southern women’s fiction rewrites the gender roles.

This introduction describes the start of the correspondence and friendship between two remarkable women writers, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Ellen Glasgow, as well as some of the historical context and the importance and influence of their preserved letters. While these women were very different-- Glasgow was a former Southern debutante and Rawlings was a raucous pioneer of the Florida scrub-- they felt for one another a remarkable kinship. While theirs was not the only relationship of its kind, it was one of the great literary friendships of the South, and should be studied for the impact that such friendships may have on the lives and experiences of women writers.

This chapter describes how the most significant Civil War writing was retrospective. The literary surge of Civil War remembering began, it seems, with the drying of the ink on General Robert E. Lee's April 9, 1865 surrender. This prodigious production continued to the end of the decade and beyond. Indeed, the need for imaginative recollection of this momentous event was intensified by historical distance, so that a writer in 1998 could describe the Civil War as still “unfinished.” In this sense, the chief cultural effect of the Civil War was to keep Americans permanently fixed in the four years of traumatic conflict. The array of novels and memoirs published in the decades after the war by such varied and prominent authors as Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Ellen Glasgow, Frances Harper, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Henry James, and Ulysses S. Grant lend support to this view.

The key economic issue in southern modernism is the imaginary possibility of modernity, because the southern economy did not actually diversify, industrialize, and urbanize on a large scale until after World War II. But after World War I, many southerners realized that the South was out of synch with modernity and that modernity would inevitably radiate into the distal South. This chapter describes the socioeconomic conflicts that developed as modernity radiated into the South and analyses literary and intellectual responses to modernity in the wake of World War I from a cross section of thinkers who responded defensively to changes taking place in the South, including Ellen Glasgow, the Agrarians, W. J. Cash, and William Faulkner. Books by southern modernists portray mechanization as a force that disrupts the South’s social order, and they tend to be wary of the effects of that instability, indicating their resistance to modernity.

This chapter discusses Latouche’s background growing up in Richmond, Virginia. It includes brief discussion of such leading local artistic figures of the time as James Branch Cabell, Ellen Glasgow, and John Powell, all of whom played some role, even if indirectly, in his life. This chapter also explores Latouche’s deception regarding basic facts about his life and background, including his age and his Jewish roots on his mother’s side. This chapter also covers his parents’ marriage and divorce, and his relationship with his mother, brother, and other family members. Some consideration is given to Richmond’s Jewish community, and Latouche’s religious affiliation and spiritual interests.