Books: Retreat to the Hills

VEIN OF IRON—Ellen Glasgow—Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

In the nine years since the Book-of-the-Month Club was founded, seven writers have had two novels chosen by it. Last week Ellen Glasgow moved into the exclusive company of Booth Tarkington, W. R. Burnett, Thames Williamson, Rosamond Lehmann, James Gould Cozzens, H. G. Wells and Vicki Baum—with an ambiguous, partly realistic, partly philosophical novel of three generations of Virginians, poor but cultivated folk who struggled to find some significance in the harrowing changes that swept their lives.

Ada Fincastle, sensitive, grey-eyed daughter of an unfrocked minister, inherited...