Barren Ground by Ellen Glasgow, book cover

Barren Ground

Pages
384

About this book

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.

About the author

Ellen Glasgow

Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow was an American novelist who won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1942 for her novel In This Our Life. She published 20 novels, as well as short stories, to critical acclaim.

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Book facts

Reading time
About 11 hours
Pages
384
Language
English
Formats
PDF, EPUB, Read online