The Romantic Comedians by Ellen Glasgow

First published: 1926

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Fiction of manners

Time of plot: 1920’s

Locale: Queenborough, Virginia

Principal characters

• Judge Gamaliel Bland Honeywell, a widower of sixty-five
• Annabel, his twenty-three-year-old second wife
• Mrs. Upchurch, Annabel’s mother
• Edmonia Bredalbane, the Judge’s sister
• Amanda Lightfoot, the Judge’s childhood sweetheart

The Story:

As Judge Honeywell walks home from church on the first Easter morning after his wife’s death, he is surprised by his own reactions to the Virginia springtime. He feels quite young for sixty-five, and his life with his wife, now dead, seems so remote as never to have happened. In fact, he feels relieved, for his wife had seldom let him lead an existence of his own.

The Judge has for some time hospitably looked after Mrs. Upchurch and her daughter, Annabel, because they are kinswomen of his late wife, but shortly after this memorable Easter morning, he begins to think of twenty-three-year-old Annabel in quite another way. His change in attitude had begun because he is secretly sorry for her. She had been engaged to a young man who left her almost at the altar, and this had hurt her bitterly, as the Judge and her mother know.

As time passes, Judge Honeywell finds himself thinking more and more of Annabel Upchurch and also of Amanda Lightfoot, his childhood sweetheart. Unfortunately, the Judge’s sister, Mrs. Bredalbane, tries to convince him that falling in love with Amanda would be the sensible thing to do. The Judge promptly closes his mind to Amanda and begins thinking more of Annabel, who has asked the Judge to help her open a flower shop.

Soon the Judge has purchased a house with a large garden for Mrs. Upchurch and her daughter so that Annabel might practice landscape gardening. When he tells the girl about the house, he adds that the only reward he expects is that of seeing her happy; however, when she takes her leave, he kisses her.

By the time Mrs. Upchurch and Annabel are settled in their new home, the Judge knows that he is in love with Annabel, who is more than forty years younger than he. He buys new clothes and has his hair and beard trimmed to lessen the amount of gray that shows in them. He feels that he could give Annabel everything she needs—love, tenderness, security, and wealth.

The number and quality of the Judge’s gifts soon make apparent to Annabel and her mother what is on the old man’s mind. Annabel thinks at first that it would be more suitable for him to marry her mother; however, as she informs her mother, marrying an older man is certainly better than living in an atmosphere of shabby gentility. Annabel decides to visit Amanda Lightfoot. Knowing that Amanda has never married because she had been in love with the Judge, Annabel wishes to find out if the older woman still loves him. If she does not, Annabel decides, she herself will marry him. Amanda, however, almost refuses to say anything at all. Annabel is disappointed but secretly relieved. When she arrives home, Judge Honeywell is waiting with a present for her, a sapphire bracelet. Before he leaves the house, he tells Annabel that he loves her, and she accepts him.

After they are married, the Judge and Annabel travel in England and in continental Europe. The Judge feels that he is as fine a man as he was at thirty-five, although his nerves are jarred a little on occasion when someone assumes that Annabel is his daughter. That she often dances with young men does not bother him. He feels no envy of their youth; after all, she is his wife.

Following their honeymoon, the Judge is glad to be back in his home in Virginia. The dyspepsia he suffered in Europe soon disappears after he begins to eat familiar cooking once more, and he feels at peace to be living in the familiar old house, which has not been refurnished in more than thirty years.

The couple dine out frequently and attend many dances. The Judge, after noting how silly his contemporaries appear on the dance floor, abstains from dancing, but he encourages Annabel to enjoy herself. He always goes to the dances with her, not from jealousy but because he feels that he has to keep up with her life. This costs him a great deal of effort—on some of their evenings out he thinks that he never before knew what fatigue is really like.

At home, Annabel brings changes into the house. While he does not approve, Judge Honeywell says nothing—that is, until she tries to change the furniture in his own room. She learns then that he will not let her meddle with his own privacy.

When the Judge comes down with bronchitis, Annabel proves an able and attentive nurse. During his convalescence, however, she finds it difficult to remain at home reading night after night. The Judge notices her restlessness and tells her that she should begin going out again, even though he cannot go with her. Annabel does resume going out, and on those evenings she is away her mother or the Judge’s sister joins the Judge for dinner and stays with him until Annabel returns.

The passing weeks bring a change in Annabel that many people notice. Previously noted for her boisterous spirit and lack of reticence, she becomes increasingly vague about her comings and goings. At the same time, their acquaintances compliment the Judge on how happy she seems. The compliments make the old gentleman content, for, as he says, Annabel’s happiness is what he wants most.

Slowly, Judge Honeywell begins to feel that all is not right in his home. Annabel is distant in her manner, but when he talks with his sister and Annabel’s mother, both reassure him of his wife’s devotion. Still, he knows that something is not right, and he receives proof that his suspicions are warranted one day when he finds Annabel kissing a young man, Dabney Birdsong. Dabney belongs to an old family in the community, and Annabel has resolved to have him at whatever the cost. The Judge’s greatest concern is that Annabel’s relationship with Dabney might be only an infatuation that will not make her happy. Annabel, on the other hand, thinks that if she does not have Dabney, she will die.

Annabel and her lover run away to New York City, and the Judge follows them. Unable to understand his young wife, he feels sorry for her because she has defied convention and thinks that he himself is to blame for what has happened. After a talk with Annabel, he leaves New York, defeated, to return to Virginia.

After traveling home from New York on a drafty train, the Judge comes down with a cold that turns into influenza, and he is seriously ill and confined to bed for several weeks. During his convalescence, he discovers that spring has once more arrived. With the stirring in nature, he feels a resurgence of life in his weary body. Once again, the season of freshness and greenery gives him the feeling of youthfulness that he had on the previous Easter Sunday morning. He finds himself beginning to look with new, eager interest at the young nurse who is attending him during his illness.

Bibliography

Beilke, Debra. “’The Courage of Her Appetites’: The Ambivalent Grotesque in Ellen Glasgow’s Romantic Comedians.” In Scenes of the Apple: Food and the Female Body in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Women’s Writing, edited by Tamar Heller and Patricia Moran. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. Focuses on the relationship between food and the body images of the female characters in Glasgow’s novel.

Godbold, E. Stanly, Jr. Ellen Glasgow and the Woman Within. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972. Reliable biography offers informative commentary on Glasgow’s major novels.

Hall, Caroline King Barnard. “’Telling the Truth About Themselves’: Women, Form, and Idea in The Romantic Comedians.” In Ellen Glasgow: New Perspectives, edited by Dorothy M. Scura. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995. Provides a feminist interpretation of the novel.

Holman, C. Hugh. “The Comedies of Manners.” In Ellen Glasgow: Centennial Essays, edited by M. Thomas Inge. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976. Contrasts the comedy of Glasgow’s Queenborough trilogy—The Romantic Comedians, They Stooped to Folly, and The Sheltered Life (1932)—with the didacticism of her earlier realistic novels. Focuses on Glasgow’s narrative techniques and points out similarities and differences among the novels of the trilogy.

Patterson, Martha H. “Mary Johnston, Ellen Glasgow, and the Evolutionary Logic of Progressive Reform.” In Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895-1915. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005. Chapter discussing Glasgow’s work is part of a larger examination of how writers at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth challenged the image of the “New Woman”—who was well educated, progressive, and white—by creating women characters who were African American, southern, and in other ways different from that image.

Raper, Julius Rowan. From the Sunken Garden: The Fiction of Ellen Glasgow, 1916-1945. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. Offers thoughtful commentary on all of Glasgow’s major novels. Argues that The Romantic Comedians displays a classic comic pattern of subversion of gerontocracy by youth.

Rouse, Blair. Ellen Glasgow. New York: Twayne, 1962. Provides a good introduction to Glasgow’s fiction. Views Glasgow’s fictional Queenborough as the essence of several Virginia towns and suggests tragic overtones within the comedy of The Romantic Comedians.

Taylor, Welford Dunaway, and George C. Longest, eds. Regarding Ellen Glasgow: Essays for Contemporary Readers. Richmond: Library of Virginia, 2001. Collection of essays includes examinations of such topics as Glasgow and southern history, Glasgow and Calvinism, Glasgow’s depictions of southern women, and the feminist elements in her work.