Vein of Iron by Ellen Glasgow

Published in 1935, Ellen Glasgow’s novel ‘Vein of Iron’ is considered to be one of her best. The story opens in the years just before the first World War and laid in the Valley of Virginia. The book traces the experience of a family with four generations of strong women. Faced with a crisis when the bread-winner, a philosopher-minister, is defrocked for his unorthodox views, the women provide the “vein of iron” which carries the family through removal to Queensboro, through war and depression until the final return to the mountains.