Barren Ground

Ellen Glasgow thought this her best book, and she was probably right. Dorinda Oakley is twenty when a broken engagement wrecks the life she had imagined for herself in the poor farm country of Piedmont Virginia. She runs to New York, comes back with money and an education in scientific farming, and spends the next thirty years turning her family’s exhausted broomsedge fields into a working dairy. The land recovers. Whether Dorinda does is the question Glasgow refuses to answer sentimentally, and the novel’s force sits in that refusal. Published in 1925, it broke with the moonlight-and-magnolias South of popular fiction and helped open the road for the writers who came after. Free PDF and EPUB edition available here.