The Romantic Comedians - Softcover

Long before Deborah Tannen began exploring linguistic differences between male and female communication styles, Ellen Glasgow depicted the problem in The Romantic Comedians. Playing on ideas about gender and power through sexual alignments, the novel offers rare feminist insight into relations between the sexes in southern society during the twenties. It is one of the few American comedies of manners written by a woman. In The Romantic Comedians Glasgow takes the familiar story of the cuckold and raises it to a new level. 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 delusions about women as it allows him to delude himself.

Ellen Glasgow was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1873. She received the Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1940, the Southern Authors Prize and the Saturday Review of Literature award for Distinguished Service to American Literature in 1941, and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1942. Her other books include The Sheltered Life and her autobiography, The Woman Within (both available in paperback from the University Press of Virginia); Viginia; Barren Ground;Vein of Iron; They Stooped to Folly; and In This Our Life. Dorothy M. Scura is Professor of English at the University of Tennessee.