Virginia-born novelist Ellen Glasgow played a leading role in helping Southern literature move away from the idealized, romantic portraits that were common in the nineteenth century, and toward a more gritty, realistic, nuanced view of the region.The Virginia of this book's title is a woman, Virginia Pendleton, who strives throughout her life to live up to the ideal of Southern femininity, but it's a guise that ultimately does her more harm than

Though he later gained widespread acclaim as a pioneering writer of fantasy fiction, James Branch Cabell's early novels are largely realistic and dryly humorous in tone. The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck, which unfolds in early-twentieth-century Virginia, is a comedy of manners set among the upper echelons of Richmond high society.