Trifles {The Role of Women​}

Susan Glaspell, 1876-1948

 

Susan Keating Glaspell is an important American novelist and dramatist. She was born on July 1, 1876 in Davenport, Iowa. She rebelled against the Victorian customs she grew up with by going to attend college at Drake University, graduating in 1899 (Ozieblo 14). She published a few short stories during her time in college and afterwards began reporting for the Des Moines Daily News. A couple years later, she returned to Davenport to continue writing short stories, which appeared in the Ladies' Home Journal and Harper's magazines, to name a few. These short stories contained a feminine point of view and also a lot of "local color"--truly portraying Glaspell's midwestern life. Her first novel was a romance called The Glory of the Conquered, and it had some success. After the publishing of her second novel and a collection of stories, she married George Cram Cook in 1913. They moved to Greenwich Village and became important parts of its literary sphere. Her novel Fidelity was published in 1915, a work involving symbolism and expressionism. That summer, during a stay at their summer home in Provincetown on Cape Cod, Glaspell and Cook founded and performed in an amateur theatre group with some other thespians in the town. This group went on to be formally recognized as the Provincetown Players and added to their schedule a winter theatre season in Greenwich Village. Trifles (1916) is one of many plays Glaspell wrote for the Players; others include Close the Book (1917), A Woman's Hour (1918), and The Verge (1921). In 1922, Glaspell and her husband moved to Delphi, Greece. Cook died there only two years later, and Glaspell got remarried to Norman Matson. Glaspell traveled back to New York and went on to write a biography about her husband and a few more plays and novels. Her play Alison's House (1930) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. She died in Provincetown on July 27, 1948. Her work was not strongly recognized until around the 1980s with the women's movement, which rediscovered her work A Jury of Her Peers, which is the short story version of Trifles (Ozieblo 14).

 

 

 

 

 

For some snapshots of Glaspell's life, take a look at her Instagram account!