The Romantic Comedians

By Ellen Glasgow

1926

First Published

3.74

Average Rating

350

Number of Pages

10H41M

Audio Length

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 young women prefer old lovers to young ones. His sheltered mind allows these dillusions about women as it allows him to delude himself.

Avg Rating

3.74

Number of Ratings

5 STARS

13%

4 STARS

61%

3 STARS

13%

2 STARS

13%

1 STARS

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Author

Ellen Glasgow

Author · 12 books

aka Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow American writer Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow won a Pulitzer Prize for In This Our Life (1941), her realistic historical novel of Virginia. Born into an upper-class Virginian family, Glasgow at an early age rebelled against traditional expectations of women and authored 20 bestselling novels. Southern settings of the majority of her novels reflect her awareness of the enormous social and economic changes, occurring in the South in the decades before her birth and throughout her own life. Beginning in 1897, she wrote her novels and many short stories, mainly about life in Virginia. Glasgow read widely to compensate for her own rudimentary education. She maintained a close lifelong friendship with James Branch Cabell, another notable writer of Richmond. She spent many summers at the historic Jerdone Castle plantation estate of her family in Bumpass, Virginia; this venue reappears in her writings. Her works include: The Descendant (1897), Phases of an Inferior Planet (1898), The Voice of the People (1900), The Battle- Ground (1902), The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields (1904), The Romance of a Plain Man (1909), Virginia (1913), The Builders (1919), The Past (1920), Barren Ground (1925), The Romantic Comedians (1926), They Stooped to Folly (1929), The Sheltered Life (1932), Vein of Iron (1935), In This Our Life (1941).