The Sheltered Life by Ellen Glasgow

The Sheltered Life by Ellen Glasgow

""The Sheltered Life,"" writes Carol S. Manning in her Afterword to this new paperback edition, is ""a jewel of American literature and deserves recognition as a masterpiece of the Southern Renaissance."" It is a remarkably unsentimental look at the old South, a society that blindly holds to past values enforced by a strict code of conduct, being overtaken by the new age of industrialization.

Ellen Glasgow's career-long attempt to expose the cruelty of the ""cult of beauty worship"" and the ""philosophy of evasive idealism"" that she saw as prevalent in the South's conversations, manners, customs, and literature reaches its zenith in The Sheltered Life.

Ellen Glasgow was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1873. She received the Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1940, the Southern Authors Prize and the Saturday Review of Literature award for Distinguished Service to American Literature in 1941, and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1942. Her other books include Viginia, Barren Ground, Vein of Iron, They Stooped to Folly, In This Our Life, and an autobiography, The Woman Within. Carol S. Manning is Associate Professor of English at Mary Washington College.