The Romantic Comedians was published by Doubleday, Page in 1926, the year after Barren Ground, and it marked Glasgow’s turn from the grim realism of her rural novels to the urbane social comedy that would occupy her for the next six years. The novel is the first in an informal trilogy — followed by They Stooped to Folly (1929) and The Sheltered Life (1932) — set in Queenborough, Glasgow’s fictional version of Richmond.
Judge Gamaliel Bland Honeywell is sixty-five, recently widowed, and the most respectable man in Queenborough — a judge, a churchman, a pillar of the community. Within months of his wife’s death, he falls in love with Annabel Upchurch, a girl of twenty-three, and marries her against the advice of everyone who knows him. The comedy lies in the gap between the Judge’s romantic self-image (he believes himself youthful, vigorous, and irresistible) and the reality that everyone else sees (an old man making a fool of himself). Annabel, for her part, marries for security rather than love, and the marriage inevitably collapses when she falls in love with a man her own age.
Glasgow handles the comedy with a lightness of touch that is new in her work. The Judge is not a villain — he is genuinely kind, genuinely deluded, and genuinely pitiable — and Glasgow’s satire is directed not at him personally but at the culture that has taught him to confuse desire with entitlement and vanity with romance. The women of Queenborough — who watch the Judge’s courtship with a mixture of amusement and exasperation — provide a chorus of feminine wisdom that the Judge cannot hear.
The novel was a critical and commercial success, and it established Glasgow’s reputation as a comic writer — a reputation that coexisted uneasily with her earlier identity as a social realist. She was equally good at both modes, and the Queenborough comedies demonstrate a mastery of ironic tone that places her alongside Edith Wharton and Dawn Powell in the front rank of American comic novelists.
First edition (Doubleday, Page, New York, 1926): Blue cloth, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $40–$120
- Without jacket: $10–$25
- Later editions: $5–$10