Pulitzer Prize Fiction Winner
In This Our Life
by Ellen Glasgow
Summary
In a once-prominent Virginia family clinging to fading respectability, the willful younger daughter Stanley Timberlake leaves emotional wreckage in her wake as she pursues her own desires across generations of relatives. Glasgow uses the household to dramatize the broader exhaustion of the Old South's social order in the face of modern restlessness and self-interest. Her cool, ironic narration places sympathy with those who must absorb the damage rather than with the charming destroyer at its center.
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Historical Context & Significance
Glasgow was a grande dame of Southern letters who had been writing for 40 years; this late-career win acknowledged her lifetime achievement in chronicling the decline of the Old South aristocracy.