The Battle-Ground was published by Doubleday, Page in 1902, Glasgow’s first attempt at the Civil War novel and the beginning of what she would later describe as her panoramic chronicle of Virginia from 1850 to the present. The novel covers the period from the late 1850s through the end of the war, following two families — the Doolittle Lightfoots and the related Amblers — through the collapse of the planter world.
Dan Montjoy, the novel’s central figure, is a passionate, impulsive young aristocrat who goes to war expecting glory and finds horror. Glasgow’s treatment of the war itself is striking for its time: she does not describe great battles or heroic charges but focuses on hunger, exhaustion, disease, and the ordinary degradation of military life. Dan returns from the war physically and psychologically damaged, to a home that has been burned and a world that no longer exists.
The novel was Glasgow’s deliberate challenge to the Thomas Nelson Page tradition of Civil War fiction, in which noble Confederates fight gallantly and return to rebuild their world with the help of loyal former slaves. Glasgow’s soldiers are not noble — they are scared, confused, and often brutal — and her former slaves are not loyal — they leave, which Glasgow presents as entirely rational.
Collecting The Battle-Ground
First edition (Doubleday, Page, New York, 1902): Green cloth.
Market values:
- First edition, good condition: $25–$70
- Later editions: $5–$10