The Battle-Ground

The BattleGround Ellen Glasgows fourth novel was her first bestseller withmore than 21000 copies sold in just two weeks. The novel committed her to aproject alm... » 

The BattleGround Ellen Glasgows fourth novel was her first bestseller withmore than 21000 copies sold in just two weeks. The novel committed her to aproject almost unparalleled in American literary history a novelisticmeditation on the South from the decade before the Confederacy to the middle ofthe 20th century. The BattleGround speaks of a South before and during theCivil War in its struggles to become part of a nation still in the making. Theoverthrow of the aristocratic tradition the transfer of hereditary power to arural underclass the continued disenfranchisement of African Americans andthe evolving status of women these topics which came to bind the more thana dozen volumes of Glasgows selfstyled social history initially coalescedin The BattleGround.The BattleGround conspicuously departs from the tradition of Southern romancespopularized by Thomas Nelson Page and contemporary reviewers praised the bookfor its historical accuracy. Glasgow an ardent Anglophile bragged thatmilitary officers in Great Britain studied its descriptions of battle. Withher realism had not only crossed the Atlantic it had crossed the Potomac.But Glasgow never sensationalizes the Civil War whose bloodiest scenes sheflanks with domestic officers the sharing of rations the warmth of camp andreminders of home. Her vision of the war centers less on its corruption orbarbarity than on its occasions for small decencies and their power ofhumanization. Glasgow cannot separate the war from its greater socialimplications it is a place as her title suggests that tests the soul of anation as well as individual men and women. The importance of TheBattleGroundin Southern literary history cannot be overemphasized for Glasgowsreimagining of the Civil War had a profound impact on the next generation ofSouthern writers including Allen Tate Stark Young and Margaret Mitchell. «