"Vein of Iron" is a novel by Ellen Glasgow, set in the Valley of Virginia. The novel traces the experience of a family with four generations of strong women. The title refers to the inner strength demonstrated by these women facing one setback after another, from poverty to social intolerance, in the time from the First World War to the Great Depression.

"Ellen Glasgow considered Vein of Iron, published in 1935, to be her best work. "No novel has ever meant quite so much to me," she wrote a friend. The critics agreed; the book was favorably reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review and outsold all but one other work of fiction in the year of its publication." "Opening 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 Richmond (Queensboro in the book), through war and depression until the final return to the mountains."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved