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Good. No Jacket. Ex-Libris. 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" tall. Green boards have touch of wear. Previous owner name on title page in ink. Pages are clean & text is free from markings. All pages secure in binding.
Ellen Glasgow (1873-1945) was a successful writer during her lifetime, but her work is too little known today. It is due for a revival. Glasgow lived most of her life in Richmond, Virginia, and was critically praised as an early naturalist writer. She attempted to describe the South without the romantic accretions of "Lost Cause" mythology that arose following the Civil War.
Glasgow wrote Vein of Iron in 1935, and the book placed second on the best-seller lists that year. It is typical for her work which bridged the gap between serious and popular literature. I first read this novel three years ago and was pleased to have the opportunity to reread it as part of a book group. I was surprised at how much I had missed -- and probably got wrong -- on my first reading. If serious literature can be characterized as a book that bears reading slowly and more than once, then Vein of Iron has met this standard for me.
The book is set primarily in rural Virginia from about 1901 through 1935 (running into the first term of President Roosevelt). The story centers on the Fincastle family of Scotch-Irish descent which has lived in what has become a rundown manse in the small fictional village of Ironside since before the Revolutionary War.
Several family members get a great deal of attention in the novel. Ada Fincastle is a young woman in love with a young man named Ralph McBride. She loses Ralph, as a result of a forced marriage to a rich, selfish girl, Janet Rowan, who claims Ralph got her pregnant. She ultimately marries Ralph, but only after a two-day torrid affair in the woods before the divorce between Ralph and Janet is concluded. Ralph returns from WW I cynical and disillusioned and the couple struggle to retain their love for one another.
Ada's father, John Fincastle, is the other major character in the story. Fincastle is a Presbyterian minister who has been defrocked "after he had told the Presbytery he rejected the God of Abraham but accepted the God of Spinoza." (p.45) Fincastle has spent his life writing a multi-volume work of philosophy, heavily influenced by a combination of philosophical naturalism, German idealism, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, and, I think especially, Buddhism and Eastern thought. Glasgow herself was a religious seeker of an unorthodox cast who had been fascinated with Buddhism when young. I found her portrait of John Fincastle compelling.
The main characters also include Ada's grandmother as well as Fincastle's wife, who dies early in the book, and a character named Aunt Meggie all of whom retain traditional Presbyterian religious convictions and all of whom are sympathetically portrayed.
Much of the theme of the book is stated in the title, as the characters, regardless of their differences in religious outlook maintain their fortitude and strength in the face of difficulty, adversity, and change. Besides fortitude and interior toughness, the second large theme of the book, I think, is human compassion. As the family suffers and observes the suffering of others during the Great Depression, John and Ada, in particular, come to realize and to put into practice the value of limiting one's own egocentrism and trying to work to alleviate the sufferings of others. There is a Buddhist mantra that is repeated at several important places in this novel: "May all beings be delivered from suffering" -- known as the lovingkindness (or metta) meditation that seemed to me initially and still seems to me upon rereading to be at the heart of this book.
The book has excellent descriptions of life in rural Virginia and of the growth of the urban South in a larger fictitous city called Queenborough. Industrialization and the suffering resulting from the Depression are portrayed well. There are also sympathetic, non-stereotyped portrayals of African-Americans, uncommon in a work of this era.
For all the descriptions of place and the intensity of the love story, I still concluded on my reading that the main focus of this book was spiritual. Glasgow writes knowingly both of the loss of faith in traditional Western religions and also of the need for the spiritual values of wisdom, self-understanding, and compassion. Her book has a serious tone throughout and her quest remains distinctly modern.
I found, as I did when I first read Vein of Iron that much of the book is overwritten and that its tone is melodramatic in places. In spite of that, Vein of Iron works on many levels. I found it primarily a picture of a timeless spiritual quest. It encourages the reader away from the materialism of the everyday, whether found in rural Virginia or anywhere else, to search for meaning, wisdom, and compassion, regardless of whether the reader finds these values within or without the boundaries of a traditional religious faith.
