's rustics, still the resemblance is hardly
greater than that which actually exists between parts of rural Virginia
and rural Wessex; Miss Glasgow is at least as faithful to her scene as
if she had devoted herself solely to a chronicle of rich planters, poor
whites, and obeisant freedmen. Without any important sacrifice of
reality she has enlarged her material by lifting it toward the plane of
the pastoral and rounding it out with poetic abundance instead of
whittling it down with provincial shrewdness or weakening it with
village sentimentalism.

That she does not lack shrewdness appears from the evidences in _Life
and Gabriella_ and still more in _Virginia_ of her second distinctive
quality--a critical attitude toward the conventions of her locality. In
one Miss Glasgow exhibits a modern Virginia woman breaking her medieval
shell in New York; in the other she examines the subsequent career of a
typical Southern heroine launched into life with no equipment but
loveliness and innocence. Loveliness, Virginia finds, may fade and
innocence may become a nuisance if wisdom happens to be needed. She
fails to understand and eventually to "hold" her husband; she gives
herself so completely to her children that in the end she has nothing
left for herself and is tragically dispensable to them. _Virginia_ is at
once the most thorough and the most pathetic picture extant of the
American woman as Victorianism conceived and shaped and misfitted her.
But the book is much more than a tract for feminism to point to: it is
unexpectedly full and civilized, packed with observation, tinctured with
omen and irony.

_William Allen White_

If Miss Glasgow emerges considerably--though not immensely--above the
deadly levels of fiction, so does William Allen White. What lifts him is
his hearty, bubbling energy. He has the courage of all his convictions,
of all his sentiments, of all his laughter, of all his tears. He has a
multitude of right instincts and sound feelings, and he habitually
reverts to them in the intervals between his stricter hours of thought.
Such stricter hours he is far from lacking. They address themselves
especially to the task of showing why and how corruption works in
politics and of tracing those effects of private greed which ruin souls
and torture societies. The hero-villains of _A Certain Rich Man_ and of
_In the Heart of a Fool_ tread all the paths of selfishness and come to
hard ends in punishment for the offense