The Southern Lady from Pedestal to Terra Firma: Isa Glenn's Southern Charm

Abstract

Into their realism of social history or satire come doctrinaire attitudes which are as unhealthy as the undue exaggeration of southern traditions for which writers of the older school have been blamed. They are imported, not native attitudes, and they cause one to reflect how poor an exchange scorn is for sentimentality. In the novels of Frances Newman [her fellow Atlanta native] or the lighter works of Isa Glenn, the deliberate puncturing of pretensions thought to be southern smacks of a paying-off of old scores: the southern woman, now intellectually as emancipated as her northern sister, takes a dig at the tradition that would have kept her in “woman’s place.”