Novel: In This Our Life

Overview
Ellen Glasgow's 1941 novel In This Our Life is a late-career study of Southern society that pairs psychological insight with unflinching social critique. Set in Richmond, Virginia, the narrative traces how private failings and public mores intersect to produce moral ambiguity, family conflict, and racial injustice. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1942 and is notable for the author's unsentimental portrayal of genteel decline and the costs of self-deception.

Plot and Characters
The story centers on a family torn by rivalry, ambition, and personal compromise. Two sisters embody divergent moral temperaments: one ambitious and self-justifying, the other quieter and more principled. Their choices ripple outward, entangling lovers, friends, and the wider community in scandal and hardship. Complications escalate when a personal tragedy becomes a public affair, forcing legal and ethical reckonings that reveal both individual culpability and institutional prejudice.

Themes
At the heart of the novel is a probing examination of moral ambiguity: characters are neither wholly villainous nor purely virtuous but are portrayed with the ambiguities of real human beings. Family rivalry and the desire for status drive many decisions, exposing the fragility of genteel respectability. Glasgow confronts the racial and social hierarchies of the Jim Crow South, depicting how prejudice shapes outcomes in courts, workplaces, and intimate relationships. The work interrogates notions of responsibility, the blindness of inherited privilege, and the corrosive effect of self-justification.

Style and Psychological Acuity
Glasgow's narrative voice balances clarity with a quietly investigative tone, attending closely to motives and small moral acts. The prose is economical yet richly observant, often revealing character through gesture and internal justification rather than melodramatic exposition. Psychological acuity is a hallmark: the author excavates the private reasoning that enables public wrongdoing, making readers complicit witnesses to the slippery rationalizations that sustain social inequities.

Social Critique and Context
In This Our Life moves beyond merely depicting individual failings to critique the social structures that allow injustice to persist. The legal and civic responses to the central conflict expose systemic bias, and Glasgow links personal compromise to broader cultural tolerance for inequality. The Richmond setting is more than backdrop; it functions as a social organism whose codes and hierarchies shape destinies. The novel's treatment of race and class, rendered at a time when many Southern writers were still defending tradition, marks it as both courageous and controversial for its era.

Reception and Legacy
Critical response acknowledged the novel's moral seriousness and technical mastery, awarding it the Pulitzer Prize the year after publication. Its realism and willingness to interrogate Southern mores resonated with readers and critics who saw in Glasgow an important voice confronting uncomfortable truths. The novel was adapted for film in 1942, bringing its central tensions to a wider audience. Over time the book has come to be read as a mature summation of Glasgow's concerns: a compassionate yet unsparing account of how individual choices and systemic forces conspire to shape human lives.