The Romantic Comedians
by Ellen Glasgow
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In The Romantic Comedians Ellen Glasgow takes the familiar story of the cuckold and raises it to a new leve. Her sixty-five-year-old male protagonist, the recently widowed Judge Gamaliel Honeywell, falls in love with and marries an impulsive twenty-three-year-old woman, emblem of the 1920s. As the symbol of patriarchy, the Judge espouses all of the chivalrous myths about women, insisting that older women are not interested in love, that a man is only as old as his instincts, and that some show more young women prefer old lovers to young ones. His sheltered mind allows these dillusions about women as it allows him to delude himself. show lessTags
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Well-drawn characters, sly wit, well-crafted sentences. A little slow in places by modern standards, but the quality of the writing overcame the occasional longeurs. Makes me want to read her next two novels of manners, They Stooped to Folly and The Sheltered Life -- will have to shoehorn them into my reading program somehow.
I originally chose to read this book not for its own sake but as part of my study of James Branch Cabell, a close associate of Glasgow who was raised in the same Richmond Virginia milieu. In that regard it was very illuminating, for I could not help but see The Romantic Comedians as, in part, a response to Cabell's Virginian novels The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck and The Cream of the Jest. But it's a fine novel in show more and of itself. show less
I originally chose to read this book not for its own sake but as part of my study of James Branch Cabell, a close associate of Glasgow who was raised in the same Richmond Virginia milieu. In that regard it was very illuminating, for I could not help but see The Romantic Comedians as, in part, a response to Cabell's Virginian novels The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck and The Cream of the Jest. But it's a fine novel in show more and of itself. show less
490. The Romantic Comedians, by Ellen Glasgow (read 25 Jan 1956) (contains SPOILERS). This is the first book by Glasgow I read. When I decided to read it I understood it was her most famous book. On Jan 22, 1956, I said: "Reading Romantic Comedians. Dumb old judge Honeywell, 65, has asked Annabel, 23, to marry him." On Jan 24 I said: "Reading in Romantic Comedians. The dumb old judge has married Annabel, 23, and she is tired of him and he is seeing the difficulty of such a setup." On Jan 25: "Finished The Romantic Comedians. a very dull and stupid book, reeking in old-fashionedness and flaunting semi-daringly the outmoded opinions of the Twenties. Annabel runs off with Dabney, and Judge Honeywell resigns himself to the loss and resolves show more to care for her financially. The book's style is tedious, and though the story moves jerkingly along, its movement is possible only because lots of action takes place between the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next. This is the first I have ever read of Ellen Glasgow, and assuredly it will be the last." (But in 1958 I was reading all the Pulitzer fiction winners so I had to read In This Our Life, which won the Pulitzer prize in 1942. Then in 2005 and 2006 I had forgotten my resolve to read no more by her and I read two more of her books.) show less
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Lamont's Hundred Best Novels (1947)
100 works; 4 members
Best Books of 1926-1935
403 works; 10 members
Author Information
41+ Works 1,414 Members
Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow (April 22, 1873 -November 21, 1945) was an American novelist who portrayed the changing world of the contemporary south. Glasgow was born in Richmond, Virginia, of a mother who traced her ancestry to the Cavalier settlers of Tidewater Virginia and a father who descended from the Scotch-Irish of the Shenandoah Valley. show more She was a writer whose divided background helps explain her ability to combine romantic sensibility with tough-minded realism. For the Virginia Edition of her works, published by Scribner in 1938 and now out of print, she chose 12 of her 18 novels and divided them into two main groups. What she called "novels of character and comedies of manners" consist of five works: The Battle-Ground (1902); The Deliverance (1904); They Stooped to Folly (1929); Virginia (1913); and Barren Ground (1925). The remaining seven novels she grouped under the heading "social history in the form of fiction." Covering almost 100 years of life in the Old Dominion, they are perhaps better read in historical sequence rather than the order in which they were originally published: The Miller of Old Church (1911); The Romantic Comedians (1926); The Voice of the People (1900); The Romance of a Plain Man (1909); Life and Gabriella (1916); The Sheltered Life (1932); and Vein of Iron (1935). The new prefaces that she wrote for each volume of the Virginia Edition form a valuable record of her literary growth and a treatise on novel writing that compares favorably with the prefaces that Henry James wrote for the New York Edition of his works. With the addition of an introduction to the one novel she published subsequently, the Pulitzer Prize-winning In This Our Life (1941), these prefaces were brought together and published as A Certain Measure (1943). The Woman Within (1954), her own story of her inner life, parallels her fiction in its account of a courageous woman who refused to become a victim of the outmoded codes of chivalry and male domination that characterized the Old South of her heritage. She remains a transitional figure of considerable importance in the literary history of America. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Common Knowledge
- Original publication date
- 1926
- First words
- For thirty-six years Judge Gamaliel Bland Honeywell had endured the double-edged bliss of a perfect marriage; but it seemed to him, on this sparkling Easter Sunday, that he had lived those years with a stranger.
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- (3.64)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper
- ISBNs
- 3
- ASINs
- 2
