The Deliverance was published by Doubleday, Page in 1904, and it is Glasgow’s most intense exploration of the aftermath of the Civil War — not the nostalgic “Lost Cause” mythology that dominated Southern fiction but the raw, bitter reality of a world turned upside down, where former slaveholders work the fields and former overseers own the plantations.
Christopher Blake is the son of a once-great Virginia family, now reduced to farming their own land (the plantation has been bought by Bill Fletcher, a coarse, formerly poor white man who has prospered in the postwar chaos). Christopher’s blind mother, confined to her chair, does not know that the war is over — her children maintain the fiction that the Confederacy has won and that the old order persists — while Christopher himself is consumed by hatred for Fletcher and plots his destruction.
Glasgow’s treatment of the postwar South is remarkable for its honesty. She does not romanticize the old plantation order (the Blakes’ decline, she suggests, was partly the result of their own incompetence and rigidity) or demonize the new money (Fletcher is vulgar but not evil). The real villain is the culture of revenge and pride that keeps Christopher trapped in the past, unable to build a new life because he cannot let go of the old one.
The “deliverance” of the title is Christopher’s eventual liberation from his obsessive hatred — a liberation that comes through love (for Fletcher’s granddaughter, in a deliciously ironic twist) and through the recognition that the past is genuinely past. The novel argues that the South’s only hope lies in abandoning the myths that sustain its grievance and accepting the reality of change.
Collecting The Deliverance
First edition (Doubleday, Page, New York, 1904): Green cloth.
Market values:
- First edition, good condition: $30–$80
- Later editions: $5–$10