The Sheltered Life was published by Doubleday, Doran in 1932, and it is Glasgow’s masterpiece of ironic social fiction — a novel in which the mannered surface of genteel Southern life barely conceals the violence, adultery, and self-deception that lie beneath. The setting is Queenborough — Glasgow’s fictional version of Richmond, Virginia — in the years before the First World War, and the “sheltered life” of the title is the protected existence of women and girls in a society that equates ignorance with innocence and deception with good manners.
The novel has two central consciousnesses. General David Dobell Archbald, an elderly philosopher and aesthete, watches the world around him with a combination of detachment and despair: he sees the lies on which his society rests but is too old, too tired, and too implicated in the system to challenge them. His granddaughter Jenny Blair, nine years old at the novel’s opening and eighteen at its close, grows up in a world where adults smile, lie, and maintain appearances while their marriages disintegrate around them.
The central secret is the infidelity of George Birdsong, a charming neighbor who is conducting an affair while his beautiful wife Eva maintains the fiction of a happy marriage. Jenny Blair, as she grows up, develops a crush on George — a feeling that the adults around her dismiss as childish but that becomes increasingly dangerous as Jenny approaches adulthood. The novel builds to a climax of shocking violence that shatters the sheltered world and exposes the fatal consequences of a culture that values appearance over truth.
Glasgow’s technique is subtle and controlled. She uses General Archbald’s philosophical detachment to provide a running commentary on the society he observes, while Jenny Blair’s naive perspective reveals the society’s hypocrisies without understanding them. The gap between what the characters say and what they mean — the central dynamic of a culture built on evasion — is rendered with a precision that anticipates the work of Eudora Welty.
Collecting The Sheltered Life
First edition (Doubleday, Doran, New York, 1932): Blue cloth, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $60–$200
- Without jacket: $15–$35
- Later editions: $5–$10