The Centenary of Ellen Glasgow's THE SHADOWY THIRD

The Shadowy Third and Other Stories was published one hundred years ago today, on the 19th of October 1923. It is Glasgow's only short story collection, and contains seven stories. It was retitled Dare's Gift and Other Stories when it was published in England in 1924.

Ellen Glasgow (1873-1945) is best-remembered as a novelist of the realistic mode of Southern American literature, publishing a total of twenty novels (one posthumously). She won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel In This Our Life (1941). She wrote short stories for only two periods in her career; at the very beginning, she published three stories (and left others in manuscript), but by late 1897 she wrote to a friend "I shall write no more short stories and I shall not divide my power or risk my reputation." It wasn't until 1916 when she returned to write a handful of short stories over the next ten years. The best of them are collected in The Shadowy Third, only one of which dates from the late 1890s, and the bulk of the rest, save one, all appeared in magazines in the late 1910s and early 1920s.  Her Collected Stories of Ellen Glasgow (1963), edited by Richard K. Meeker, contains twelve stories, but leaves a few uncollected and some early stories unpublished.

It is interesting that Glasgow turned back to stories after meeting one of her literary idols, Henry James, in 1914. "The Turn of the Screw" has a number of similarities with "The Shadowy Third", not the least of which being its ghostly nature. In fact, Glasgow's turn towards the supernatural occurred only in her short stories, and all four or five of them appear in The Shadowy Third. In fact the first four stories in The Shadowy Third are ghost stories.  These include the title story, "Dare's Gift", "The Past" and "Whispering Leaves." The final story in the book, "Jordan's End" (original to the collection), is not specifically supernatural, but it has a stylistic feel of being nearly so. Some of Glasgow's odd story titles refer to the names of houses in the stories (e.g., Dare's Gift, Whispering Leaves, Jordan's End). Glasgow's stories are sophisticated and psychological, set among the upper class in Virginia.

The reviews were mostly complimentary. The New York Times thought her style and technique reminiscent of Guy de Maupassant. The New York Evening Post noted the Henry James influence, and two reviewers compared her stories to those by May Sinclair

The Shadowy Third did not meet the usual success of Glasgow's novels, and its first edition in the U.S. did not have a second printing. Ironically, one hundred years later, it may be the book Glasgow is most remembered for writing.

frontispiece by Elenore Plaisted Abbott