THE fighting edge of romance is always reality. It is the cut and thrust of an active will amid the material circumstances of present life. Ellen Glasgow is bent on romance with blood in it; therefore she uses the fighting edge. Northern critics haven't known quite how to take her. She disappoints their settled expectations. What they expect of Southern writers is a rapt contemplation of the embossed and beribboned antique sword hilt of romance. She gives them the edge.
By all means read "Barren Ground," if you are interested in American fiction, if you are interested in American life, if you wish the latest development of a great thesis, if you wish ripe comment on the common lot by one of the most intelligent and richly endowed novelists of our time in America.
With "Barren Ground," say the publishers, realism at the last crosses the Potomac. The South, so familiarly pictured in fiction as a land of colonels, old mansions and delicate romances, is here shown to be a hardy country peopled by farmers who live lives as real as any in our great cities or on our wide Western prairies.
Right! There is nothing essentially unreal about the farmer's life anywhere.
