In This Our Life was published by Harcourt, Brace in 1941 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1942 — the only one Glasgow received, and it came for a novel that many critics, then and now, do not consider her best work. The title is from Shakespeare’s As You Like It (“And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything”), and the irony is characteristic: the Timberlake family finds nothing good in anything.
The Timberlakes of Richmond are a family in collapse. Asa Timberlake, the patriarch, is trapped in a loveless marriage to the hypochondriacal Lavinia. Their daughter Roy is married to Peter Kingsmill, who is in turn stolen by Roy’s younger sister Stanley — a woman of extraordinary beauty and utter selfishness. Peter, ruined by the affair, kills himself. Stanley, having destroyed one man, moves on to the next, marrying Craig Fleming, whom she eventually ruins as well.
Glasgow’s most significant innovation in the novel is the subplot involving Parry Clay, a young Black man studying to become a lawyer, who is falsely accused of a hit-and-run accident actually committed by Stanley. Parry is the son of the Timberlakes’ long-time servant Minerva, and the white family’s reaction to his accusation — ranging from indifference to active complicity in the injustice — exposes the racial structure of Richmond society with an explicitness unusual for mainstream literary fiction in 1941.
The novel was adapted into a Warner Bros. film in 1942, directed by John Huston, with Bette Davis as Stanley — a casting choice that intensified the character’s destructive glamour.
Collecting In This Our Life
First edition (Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1941): Rust cloth, dust jacket. The Pulitzer Prize adds moderate value.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $50–$150
- Without jacket: $10–$30
- Warner Bros. film tie-in editions: $5–$15