Virginia was published by Doubleday, Page in 1913, and it is one of Glasgow’s most admired novels — a portrait of a woman who does everything right by the standards of her culture and is destroyed by them. Virginia Pendleton is the ideal Southern lady: gentle, self-sacrificing, devoted to her husband and children, innocent of ambition or intellect. She marries Oliver Treadwell, a young playwright who seems to share her values, and for twenty years she is perfectly happy.
But Oliver’s success takes him to New York, where he encounters women who are educated, ambitious, and sexually independent — everything Virginia is not. He gradually falls in love with one of them, and Virginia, who has no resources beyond her domestic identity, is left with nothing. Her children grow up and leave. Her beauty fades. She sits in the house in Dinwiddie, Virginia, waiting for a return that will not come.
Glasgow’s achievement is to make Virginia sympathetic without making her admirable. The reader understands why she is the way she is — her mother, her church, her school, her entire community taught her that selflessness was the highest female virtue — and the reader also understands why it fails. Virginia is not stupid; she is uneducated, which is a different thing, and the education she received (in how to be pleasing, how to serve, how to efface herself) turns out to be the worst possible preparation for a world in which those qualities are no longer valued.
The novel is simultaneously a character study, a social history, and a feminist argument — though Glasgow would have resisted that last label. She was interested in the practical consequences of ideology: what happens to real women when they are raised on lies about their own nature?
Collecting Virginia
First edition (Doubleday, Page, New York, 1913): Green cloth.
Market values:
- First edition in good condition: $30–$80
- Later editions: $5–$10