The Susan Glaspell Society
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About Susan GlaspellTo most readers, Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) is still known primarily as the author of Trifles, the frequently anthologized, classic feminist play about two women’s secret discovery of a wife’s murder of her husband, or the short-story “A Jury of Her Peers,” a re-writing of that piece. But Glaspell wrote over fifty short stories, nine novels, eleven plays, and one biography. Many of her novels reached the best-seller lists, and one, Brook Evans (1928), was made into a movie. Her plays received better reviews than those of Eugene O’Neill, and her novels were positively reviewed through the 1930s. In 1931, Glaspell was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her play Alison’s House. Her 1939 novel, The Morning is Near Us, was the Literary Guild’s Book of the Month choice for April 1940, and sold more than 100,000 copies. |
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But there is yet more: Glaspell was the co-founder with her husband George Cram Cook of the Provincetown Players (1916-1922), the Little Theatre that did most to promote American dramatists, and her diplomacy and energy held the group together for seven years. It was largely thanks to Glaspell’s intervention that O’Neill’s first plays were performed, and she played a major role in stimulating and encouraging his writing in the following years.
Susan Glaspell had never liked to
feel controlled or delimited; born in Davenport,
Iowa, in 1876, she rebelled against society’s
expectations and, rather than passively wait for a
husband to appear, went to Drake University in Des
Moines, graduating in June of 1899, and
then worked as a reporter for the Des Moines
Daily News. She gave up her newspaper job in
1901 and returned to Davenport in order to write;
she had already published a number of short
stories in Youth’s Companion, and was to
see her stories accepted by more sophisticated
magazines, such as Harper’s, Leslie’s,
The American and others. Her story “For
Love of the Hills” received the Black Cat
prize in 1904; her first novel, The Glory of
the Conquered, would come out in 1909,
followed by The Visioning in 1911. Back in her hometown, her status of published and respected author opened the doors of Davenport social and intellectual life and led to repeated meetings with George Cram Cook, whom she married in 1914. Cook was, by then, a twice-divorced father of two; he had given up a promising university career to try his hand at truck farming and socialism. The scandal and gossip provoked by his second divorce was the impulse that Glaspell and Cook needed to move East; they settled in Greenwich Village where the "rents were cheap," and where they found other freethinking liberals and radicals in both politics and art: the ideal breeding-ground for their experiments in theatre. At Cook's instigation Glaspell began writing plays, but she also published her third and most successful novel thusfar, Fidelity, in 1915. With
the support of Jack Reed and the
still unacclaimed Eugene O’Neill, Glaspell and
Cook founded the Provincetown Players in
Provincetown, Cape Cod, at the end of the summer
of 1916. This Little Theatre, which in the fall of
that year moved to New York, produced innovative
plays by American playwrights, such as
Glaspell’s The Verge (1921), and refused
to consider commercial success to be of any
significance – until O’Neill’s The
Emperor Jones gave them a taste of
Broadway. By 1922, Glaspell and Cook were so
disappointed in the back-fighting and ambitious
scheming that was dividing the Players that they
decided to close the theatre and go to Greece.
Cook’s dream had always been to explore the
sites of antiquity, and Glaspell was convinced
that they needed time together, away from
theatrical squabbles. They settled in Delphi, on
the slopes of Mt. Parnassus, where they attempted
to live the simple life of the shepherds, and
became engrossed in an archaic lifestyle that
fired Glaspell’s imagination and inspired at
least one novel. Glaspell returned to the United States in 1924, after Cook’s death in Greece, and settled in Provincetown, where she wrote two of her best novels, Brook Evans (1928) and Fugitive’s Return (1929). Brook Evans appeared first in England, where, in the bold yellow covers that distinguished Victor Gollancz’s imprint, it inaugurated his venture into independent publishing. In New York, Brook Evans reached second place on the Herald Tribune best-seller list, and the excellent sales led Paramount Pictures to film the novel, with screenplay by Zoë Akins, under the title The Right to Love. Fugitive’s Return, in which Glaspell captured the flavor of her Greek adventure, traces a woman’s growth from abject despair to independence and recognition of self; it ranked fourth on the best-seller charts, topped by Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms.
The Federal Theatre gave Glaspell
another opportunity to devote herself to American
drama in the 1930s. With Cook and the Provincetown
Players she had shown that America, given a stage,
could supply its own dramatists; as director of
the Midwest Play Bureau in Chicago she sought out
Midwestern talent and, although her contribution
is rarely recognized, was instrumental in the
development of the Living Newspapers.
However, the red tape involved got the better of her and,
resigning
from her position with the Federal Theatre, she
returned to spend her remaining years in
Provincetown and gave all her energies to fiction,
producing four more complex novels: Ambrose
Holt and Family (1931). The Morning is Near
Us (1939), Norma Ashe (1942), and Judd
Rankin’s Daughter (1945).
Glaspell’s oeuvre is
unparalleled in American letters in its major
achievements in two genres, drama and fiction.
Writing for the theatre made Glaspell more aware
of innovations in structure and style, and her
later novels benefited from her intense
involvement in the development of the American
drama. Taken together, her plays, stories, and
novels, all explore themes that continue to be
vital and challenging to readers and scholars
today – themes of American identity,
individuality vs. social conformity, the idealism
of youth, the compromises of marriage, and the
disillusionments and hopes of aging.
Both her plays and novels speak deeply of
feminist issues such as women’s struggle for
expression in a patriarchal culture that binds
them in oppressive gender binarisms, the loving yet
fraught relationships between daughters and mothers,
and women's need for female friendship as a defining
part of their growth toward autonomy and selfhood.
Photo of Susan Glaspell by Alfred
Eisenstaedt for a pictorial
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