Susan Glaspell: A Critical Biography

by Barbara Ozieblo Rajkowska

During her lifetime, playwright and novelist Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) was regarded as highly as Eugene O'Neill and Edith Wharton. Winner of the 1931 Pulitzer Prize for drama (for Alison's House ), she was cofounder of the Provincetown Players, the little theater that "discovered" O'Neill. Later, Glaspell was instrumental in introducing American drama to English audiences when her play The Verge was produced in London. Yet despite her many accomplishments, Glaspell is often overlooked in the standard histories of American theater. Now, Barbara Ozieblo returns this intriguing and important figure to the spotlight.

Ozieblo combines an engaging narrative of Glaspell's life with insightful analysis of her creative works. Rebelling early against the expectations imposed on women of her era, Glaspell grappled with the conflict between Victorian mores and feminist aspirations throughout her life. In Trifles , now recognized as a groundbreaking feminist drama, she explored the reasons for a woman's extreme response to her husband's demanding, authoritarian stance. Ozieblo also investigates Glaspell's relationship with dramatist George Cram Cook, exploring the scandal that surrounded their courtship and marriage as well as the life they led among the bohemians of Greenwich Village.

345 pages, Paperback

First published October 16, 2000

Reviews

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating biography of a fascinating lady. Susan Glaspell clearly struggled with the claiming of her own identity and her purpose in supporting the men in her life. Her works sound fascinating and she inspired so many.

[CarolineFromConcord · Rating 5 out of 5]

A friend told me there was a successful woman playwright in America in the early 20th Century. As a sometime theater reviewer, I was astonished I had never heard of Susan Glaspell, writer of plays, short stories, memoirs, and novels, co-founder of the Provincetown Players, and mentor to playwright Eugene O'Neill. She won a Pulitzer, she was instrumental in the Federal Theater under FDR. She mapped the transition of women from traditional roles in the background of their menfolk to having some fulfillment of their own. The irony of her disappearance is perfect.

I was fascinated by the biographer's descriptions and details. A beautifully written piece of work! The plots of Glaspell's stories sound a little to grim for my taste, but I want to find one of the out-of-print books just to see her style, said to be talky, cerebral, and -- in the plays -- cutting-edge experimental.

Her life itself is the plot that intrigues me most. Writing over and over about women struggling for "by-myself-ness" and some kind of personal achievement -- while propping up their less competent, needier men -- she went straight to the top of best-seller lists and her peers' lists of literary accomplishment, while letting the men in her life walk all over her. She did not seem to see that she was allowing that. She had one foot in the future and one in the Victorian world of her predecessors. Fascinating.

[~Lyn~ · Rating 4 out of 5]

One work from Susan Glaspell that I like much is a short story entitled "Trifles". Trifles is a story about two women solving the case of murder, they were paying more attention to trifles and were cleverer than the detectives in the story.