THERE IS SUCH A strong sense of realism in the work of the noted Southern writer Ellen (Anderson Gholson) Glasgow (1873–1945) that it takes a little while to accept the notion that a story does, actually, have supernatural elements. Her portrayal of Southern life within its aristocracy and lower social levels had a particular emphasis on the relationship between Southern women and the men in their lives. She won accolades in the 1920s and 1930s as one of the enduring leaders of the literary renaissance of the South. In 1940 she was awarded the Howells Medal for Fiction by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and her 1941 novel, In This Our Life, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. She did not make many forays into supernatural fiction, but her sophisticated ghost stories have been frequently anthologized and were collected in The Shadowy Third and Other Stories (1923).
Born in Richmond, Virginia, Glasgow was a rather frail child and dropped out of school at the age of nine, teaching herself by reading from her father’s substantial library. She lived briefly in New York where she began and then maintained a lengthy, long-distance affair with a married man (as recounted in her autobiography, The Woman Within, published posthumously in 1954), but soon returned to her birthplace where she continued to live and write, very much in solitude, in an old gray stone house in the middle of the city.
“The Shadowy Third” was first published in the December 1916 issue of Scribner’s Magazine. “The Past” was first published in the October 1920 issue of Good Housekeeping. Both were collected in the author’s The Shadowy Third and Other Stories (New York, Doubleday, Page, 1923).