“Dare's Gift” was originally published in the February 1917 issue of Harper's Magazine. It was collected in The Shadowy Third and Other Stories (1923). It is currently most readily available in Downhome: An Anthology of Southern Women Writers (Harcourt, Brace).

After a nearly twenty-year hiatus, Ellen Glasgow began to write short stories again when she was forty-two years old. As an energetic and ambitious young writer, she had renounced the form, declaring to her publisher Walter Hines Page in 1897 that “I shall not divide my power or risk my future reputation.” With one reasonably successful novel to her name (although it was actually published without her name on the title page or anywhere else: she was, after all, a well-bred Southern young lady), she went on to declare bravely, “I will become a great novelist or none at all.” And she certainly made as determined and serious an effort to do just that as could be expected of anyone. By June of 1916, when Glasgow began writing, as she put it, “a story about a haunted house,” she had published eleven novels—and would go on to write nine more before her death in 1945. That story, which became the title story of the only collection of her short fiction published in her lifetime, The Shadowy Third and Other Stories, was the first of ten stories that she wrote before abandoning the form again in 1924 or 1925, when she turned her full attention to the writing of her last and finest novels.

It might be possible to conclude from a chronological reading of her novels alone that she had been correct in her belief that she shouldn't divide her power among both novels and stories. In 1913, she had published Virginia, which seems more and more (especially to feminist readers) to be a major American novel, and in 1925, she would publish Barren Ground, probably her best-known and most widely read novel. And even Life and Gabriella, which appeared in 1916 right before she began to write stories, is to my mind a novel deserving of critical rediscovery and positive reassessment.