Barren Ground was published by Doubleday, Page in 1925, and Ellen Glasgow considered it her finest novel — the book in which she finally achieved the unsentimental realism she had been pursuing for two decades. The novel follows Dorinda Oakley over thirty years of her life, from a young woman seduced and abandoned by the charming, weak Jason Greylock to a middle-aged farmer who has reclaimed her family’s depleted land through scientific agriculture and sheer force of will.
The Virginia of Barren Ground is not the moonlight-and-magnolia South of popular romance but a landscape of exhausted soil, failed farms, and people ground down by poverty, isolation, and the weight of a defeated culture. Dorinda’s family farm, like most farms in the Piedmont region, has been ruined by generations of single-crop tobacco farming that has stripped the topsoil and left the land barren. Dorinda’s transformation of this land — through crop rotation, dairy farming, and the scientific methods she learns during a period of exile in New York — is both a practical achievement and a symbolic one: she reclaims not just the land but herself.
Glasgow’s treatment of Dorinda’s sexual betrayal is remarkable for its refusal of conventional consolation. Dorinda does not die of shame, marry a rescuer, or find religious consolation. She endures: she works, she plans, she builds. Her success is earned through decades of labor, and Glasgow does not romanticize either the labor or the loneliness it entails. Dorinda’s final assessment of her life — “I’ve finished with all that” — is delivered without self-pity, and it is the most devastating line Glasgow ever wrote.
The novel was Glasgow’s bid for major literary recognition, and it succeeded: it was widely praised by critics (including James Branch Cabell, H.L. Mencken, and Carl Van Doren) and it established Glasgow as the leading realist of the Southern literary tradition. The novel anticipates the Southern Renaissance of the 1930s — Faulkner, Warren, Welty — in its unsentimental treatment of the Southern landscape and its rejection of the plantation mythology that had dominated Southern fiction since the Civil War.
Collecting Barren Ground
First edition (Doubleday, Page, New York, 1925): Green cloth, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $100–$400
- Without jacket: $20–$50
- Later editions: $5–$15