The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2025, pt.5: Dennis Danvers

 

2025: Reading Ellen Glasgow

by Dennis Danvers

 

 

 My reading this year has been confined almost exclusively to a single writer. After a lifetime of literary study, I was delighted to discover a "new writer" in my own backyard, Ellen Glasgow (1873-1945), who lived her whole life in Richmond and wrote all of her novels but one here at her house at One West Main, now an historic site. I started with The Romantic Comedians and soon devoured all twenty of Glasgow's brilliant novels with relish and came to lament that she is insufficiently appreciated today. She is unparalleled as a psychological realist at least on a par with Edith Wharton and others. Her once substantial fame was eclipsed decades ago, though her twenty published novels remain brilliant as ever. Long out of print, her works are mostly only available in eBooks or from used-book sellers.

She was a big deal in her lifetime, winning most of the prizes but the Nobel. She knew everyone in the literary world, and they knew her, calling on James, Conrad, and her favorite, Hardy, who seemed quite fond of her and her work. She was a leading figure in Southern letters. Ellen and James Branch Cabell, well known in the fantasy world, were close friends, so close he gets a chapter in her posthumously published autobiography The Woman Within (1954).

Literary history isn't a meritocracy, however. As a Southern woman, she was doubly doomed to obscurity in American letters, chucked into the same bin as the dreadful and deluded Gone With the Wind. Ellen rebelled against the racist, sexist, xenophobic "Great America" long before the current crop of MAGA goons were born. No one deconstructs the notion of Southern Womanhood better than Glasgow.

Her first two novels, reminiscent of Dreiser and set in New York City, were written quite young but still hold up, in my opinion. In her critical examination of her work, A Certain Measure (1943), she explains her intention, beginning with The Voice of the People, of providing, through fiction, a social history of Virginia from the decade before the Civil War until the beginning of World War I. They are set in various locales in the Commonwealth from the piedmont to the mountains with several set in Richmond. Her later novels, beginning with Barren Ground, expand upon this program with novels she regarded (accurately in my opinion) to be her best work, most notably a trilogy of comedies of manners —The Romantic Comedians, They Stooped to Folly, and The Sheltered Life. Her last published novel, In This Our Life, won the Pulitzer in 1942. I also recommend Susan Goodman's 1998 scholarly biography, Ellen Glasgow.

 For anyone who is interested in understanding the South beyond the romantic nonsense of the Lost Cause or Faulkner's blood and thunder approach, she is unparalleled.

 

The novels:

·         The Descendant (1897)

·         Phases of an Inferior Planet (1898)

 

·         The Battle-Ground (1902)

·         The Deliverance (1904)

·         The Wheel of Life (1906)

·         The Ancient Law (1908)

  ·         The Voice of the People  (1900)

·         The Romance of a Plain Man (1909)

·         The Miller of Old Church (1911)

·         Virginia (1913)

·         Life and Gabriella (1916)

·         The Builders (1919)

·         One Man in His Time (1922)

·         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)

 

 

Dennis Danvers has published ten novels, including NYT Notables Circuit of Heaven and The Watch, and Locus- and Bram Stoker-Awards nominee Wilderness; The Perfect Stranger (2020)and The Soothsayer & The Changeling (2021). His short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Apex, F&SF, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Tor.com, Lightspeed, Electric Velocipede, and elsewhere. His story collection, Leaving the Dead was published in 2023. He taught Literature and Creative Writing for over thirty years at Virginia Commonwealth University and lives in Richmond, VA. Aqueduct Press released his Tales from Mnemosyne in 2024.

 

 

Tales from Mnemosyne by Dennis Danvers

 

 

 

 

I'm pleased to announce the release of Tales from Mnemosyne by Dennis Danvers as volume 90 in Aqueduct's Conversation Pieces series in both print and e-book editions. You can purchase it now at www.aqueductpress.com.

 

Tales from Mnemosyne retells Classical myths, largely known from Ovid, in the voice and tradition of an Appalachian storyteller, in this case, the goddess Mnemosyne. As the goddess of Memory and mother of The Muses, she is uniquely qualified to set the record straight—to tell the true stories without the usual patriarchal propaganda, all the while keeping things fun and only slightly blasphemous. Mnemosyne as a timeless goddess knows now and then backwards and forwards and has as much to say about the here and now as way back when. These fourteen tales include the most famous—Daphne and Apollo, Europa and Jove, the Birth of Athena, Cupid and Psyche—along with some too-often-forgotten ones, such as Tiresias and his daughter Manto, and Oenone, the abandoned wife of Paris. Charon, appropriately, concludes the proceedings.  

 

Advance Praise for Tales from Mnemosyne

This cool little book came in the mail yesterday, from Aqueduct’s Conversation Pieces imprint. It’s by the author, Dennis Danvers. Tales From Mnemosyne. These stories were originally told by Ovid but here they are told with the local trappings and voice of an Appalachian story teller. I heard him read one of these at World Fantasy — what a unique and effective blend of influences. Check it out.—Jeff Ford, author of The Drowned Life and Pretty Good Neighbor      

                                     

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2023, pt. 13: Dennis Danvers

 

 

Reading, Viewing, Listening in 2023

by Dennis Danvers

 

I began the year reading Bewilderment by Richard Powers and found it deeply moving. I dipped in and out of Bob Dylan's The Philosophy of Modern Song throughout the year. I've been writing a lot of songs the last few years, and hanging out with Bob is an inspiration.

 

I read Frenchman's Creek by Daphne Du Maurier and found it delightful. I also reread Rebecca, a favorite novel. I read Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens and it delivered on all those Dickensian pleasures in abundance.  I reread The Odyssey every few years, and this was the first time I read Emily Wilson's terrific translation, taut and lean and musical. I reread some Ray Bradbury—The Martian Chronicles and Dandelion Wine—I hadn't read since I was a teen, and they were both more wonderfully weird than I remembered them.

 

After Dickens, I sought out shorter novels. I enjoyed Just Like You by Nick Hornby for his usual virtues but also for the glimpse it gave me of the Brexit controversy on a human scale. The Plot: A Novel by Jean Hanff Korelitz didn't quite work for me, though it was fun. I guessed the plot too early and spoiled it... Bad Questions by Len Kruger, on the other hand, was a beautiful and funny novel about a painful adolescence not unlike my nerdy adolescence. Nine Shiny Objects by Brian Castleberry delivered a kind of retro spookiness in an understated but haunting story. Saturnalia by Stephanie Feldman offered a pagan future—what's not to like?

 

We stream a lot. Favorites include Dead to Me on Netflix, Jury Duty on Hulu, The Morning Show on Apple, Lessons in Chemistry on Apple, No One Will Save You on Hulu. In the theater I saw Barbie and the Eras Tour with my stepdaughters and loved them both.

 

As for music, I've listened to a lot of Taylor Swift—I've been a Swiftie since her first album, and this is her year. I also watch a lot of piano tutorials on Bitesize Piano, a great site by Francesca Williams, a piano teacher in the UK.

 

And just last week we went to a Richmond Shakespeare production of Hamlet that was great.

 

Dennis Danvers has published ten novels, including NYT Notables Circuit of Heaven and The Watch, and Locus- and Bram Stoker-Awards nominee Wilderness; The Perfect Stranger (2020)and The Soothsayer & The Changeling (2021). His short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Apex, F&SF, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Tor.com, Lightspeed, Electric Velocipede, and elsewhere. His story collection, Leaving the Dead was published in 2023. He taught Literature and Creative Writing for over thirty years at Virginia Commonwealth University and lives in Richmond, VA. Aqueduct Press will be releasing his Tales from Mnemosyne next month.