Ellen Glasgow's 'The Shadowy Third and Other Stories' is a haunting and thought-provoking collection of short stories. Featuring seven tales, the first four are spine-tingling ghost stories that will keep readers on edge. In 'The Shadowy Third', the narrator, Miss Randolph, must unravel the mystery surrounding Mrs. Maradick's haunted visions, while 'Dare's Gift' tells the tales of two women whose actions lead to devastating consequences. Other stories explore themes of infidelity and memory in early 20th-century society. With richly drawn characters and intricate plots, this collection showcases Glasgow's mastery of the short story form and is a must-read for fans of the genre.

Ellen Glasgow wrote only thirteen short stories during her long career, seven of which appeared in 'The Shadowy Third'. Published in 1923 by Doubleday, Page & Company, it was the only collection of short stories published during her lifetime. Of the seven tales it contains, only four are supernatural, but all have an eerie quality to them; in fact, 'Jordan's End', a non-ghost story, is the most ghostly story that the author ever wrote. This new edition contains the seven stories included in the first edition and adds to those tales a seventeen-page biographical essay by Gina R. Collia, 'Ellen Glasgow: The Solitary Spirit'.

Ellen Glasgow wrote and published nineteen novels as well as poems, short stories, essays, reviews, and an autobiography (published posthumously) in a career that spanned nearly fifty years. Until now, her writings have not been subject to feminist revaluation in the way that works of such writers as Charlotte Perkins Gilman or Willa Cather have been. In Ellen Glasgow and a Woman's Traditions Pamela R. Matthews initiates such a revaluation by taking into account not only Glasgow's gender and her perception of her role as a woman writer but the reader's gender and (mis)understanding of Glasgow. Using current feminist psychological theory, she assesses what Glasgow faced as a woman writer caught between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, examines the traditions in place at these times, and analyzes the influence on Glasgow of her female friendships. This shifting of critical perspective yields entirely new interpretations and closes the gap that has existed between standard criticisms of Glasgow and the effect that Glasgow has had on her readers.

Between the 1880s and the 1940s, opportunities for southern white women writers increased dramatically, bolstered by readers’ demands for southern stories in northern periodicals. Confined by magazine requirements and social expectations, writers often relied on regional settings and tropes to attract publishers and readers before publishing work in a collection. Selecting and ordering magazine stories for these collections was not arbitrary or dictated by editors, despite a male-dominated publishing industry. Instead, it allowed writers to privilege stories, or to contextualize a story by its proximity to other tales, as a form of social commentary. For Kate Chopin, Ellen Glasgow, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and Katherine Anne Porter—the authors featured in this book—publishing a volume of stories enabled them to construct a narrative framework of their own. Arranging Stories: Framing Social Commentary in Short Story Collections by Southern Women Writers is as much about how stories are constructed as how they are told. The book examines correspondence, manuscripts, periodicals, and first editions of collections. Each collection’s textual history serves as a case study for changes in the periodical marketplace and demonstrates how writers negotiated this marketplace to publish stories and garner readership. The book also includes four tables, featuring collected stories’ arrangements and publication histories, and twenty-five illustrations, featuring periodical publications, unpublished letters, and manuscript fragments obtained from nine on-site and digital archives. Short story collections guide readers through a spatial experience, in which both individual stories and the ordering of those stories become a framework for interpreting meaning. Arranging Stories invites readings that complicate how we engage collected works.

Scare Tactics identifies an important but overlooked tradition of supernatural writing by American women. Jeffrey Weinstock analyzes this tradition as an essentially feminist attempt to imagine alternatives to a world of limited possibilities. In the process, he recovers the lives and works of authors who were important during their lifetimes and in the development of the American literary tradition, but who are not recognized today for their contributions. Between the end of the Civil War and roughly 1930, hundreds of uncanny tales were published by women in the periodical press and in books. These include stories by familiar figures such as Edith Wharton, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, as well as by authors almost wholly unknown to twenty-first-century readers, such as Josephine Dodge Bacon, Alice Brown, Emma Frances Dawson, and Harriet Prescott Spofford. Focusing on this tradition of female writing offers a corrective to the prevailing belief within American literary scholarship that the uncanny tale, exemplified by the literary productions of Irving, Poe, and Hawthorne, was displaced after the Civil War by literary realism. Beyond the simple existence of an unacknowledged tradition of uncanny literature by women, Scare Tactics makes a strong case that this body of literature should be read as a specifically feminist literary tradition. Especially intriguing, Weinstock demonstrates, is that women authors repeatedly used Gothic conventions to express discontentment with circumscribed roles for women creating types of political intervention connected to the broader sphere of women's rights activism. Paying attention to these overlooked authors helps us better understand not only the literary marketplace of their time, but also more familiar American Gothicists from Edgar Allan Poe to Shirley Jackson to Stephen King.