In This Our Life
by Ellen Glasgow
Summary
Asa Timberlake's family has come down in the world: old Richmond stock, the tobacco company lost, the household dependent on the charity of his rich brother in law William Fitzroy, whose interest in Asa's daughter Stanley is not the interest of an uncle. Glasgow, writing at the end of her life, set out to anatomise exactly this world, the shabby genteel Virginia of 1938, and did not soften it.
The plot runs on the two sisters, who carry, in the family's way, men's names. Roy is the steady one, an interior decorator married to a young doctor, Peter Kingsmill. Stanley is the pretty one, indulged by everyone, engaged to the lawyer Craig Fleming. Weeks before the wedding Stanley runs off with Peter, and Roy is left to rebuild alongside the jilted Craig. In Baltimore the stolen marriage curdles and Peter kills himself, and Stanley comes home to be forgiven, which she is, by everyone but Roy, and sets about taking Craig back too.
Then, driving drunk, runs down a mother and her young daughter on a dark road and drives away, and lets the blame fall on Parry Clay, the son of the family's Black housekeeper, a young man the Timberlakes have known his whole life. His word against hers is no contest in that Richmond, and the novel knows precisely what that fact says about the society it has been describing.
Best for readers who want the Southern novel of manners at its most disillusioned, from the inside. Glasgow died three years later, and this was her last book.
Historical Context & Significance
In This Our Life won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1942, and the board member who pushed for it said openly that the award recognised Ellen Glasgow's whole body of work. She was nearly seventy, in poor health, and this was her twentieth novel and her last; she had spent four decades writing Virginia's transition out of its own mythology, and the prize was the establishment settling its account.
The 1942 film, made at Warner Bros with Bette Davis as Stanley, kept the hit and run and Parry's false arrest, and Bosley Crowther singled out its frank treatment of racial discrimination as almost unheard of for Hollywood. The Office of Censorship refused it a foreign release in 1943 precisely because it showed that a Black man's testimony would be disregarded against a white woman's, which is as clear a statement of what the story was about as any review.
Glasgow died in 1945. Her reputation now rests mainly on Barren Ground and The Sheltered Life, with this book read as the bleak late summation it was.