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Loading... Vein of Iron (1935)by Ellen Glasgow
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. 4217 Vein of Iron, by Ellen Glasgow (read 8 Oct 2006) I have a 1962 edition of "Good Reading" which describes this 1935 book thusly: "Grave, symphonic beauty marks this novel about the marriage of a modern Virginian true to the hard traditions of her Scottish forbears." Ada Fincastle is 10 in 1900 and this book is about her in the mountain section of Virginia. At age 20 her true love is forced to marry Janet. After six years of unhappiness Ada and her love, before he goes to France in the Great War, spend two days together, Ada becomes pregnant, and they are married when he comes home. They live thru the Twenties and the Depression. The book at times has a certain power, but towards the end seems to lose its focus and becomes more and more pointless and gets less interesting. I am not sorry I read it, but cannot say I was overly enthused by the characters, none of them overly admirable except for Ada's tough old grandmother. ( ) no reviews | add a review
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"Ellen Glasgow considered Vein of Iron, published in 1935, to be her best work. "No novel has ever meant quite so much to me," she wrote a friend. The critics agreed; the book was favorably reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review and outsold all but one other work of fiction in the year of its publication." "Opening in the years just before the First World War and laid in the Valley of Virginia, the book traces the experience of a family with four generations of strong women. Faced with a crisis when the bread-winner, a philosopher-minister, is defrocked for his unorthodox views, the women provide the "vein of iron" which carries the family through removal to Richmond (Queensboro in the book), through war and depression until the final return to the mountains."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.52Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1900-1944LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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