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I first stumbled across the work of Susan Glaspell in the mid-1980s while reading a brief discussion of her impact on women in the London theater of the early twentieth century, which was the focus of my research at that time. Theater historian Julie Holledge’s description of Glaspell’s play The Verge, in Innocent Flowers: Women in the Edwardian Theatre, proved tantalizing; why hadn’t I encountered this writer before? After a quick survey of Glaspell scholarship, I realized I was not alone. From the early 1970s on, a number of feminist scholars had been slowly rescuing Glaspell’s writing from a comparatively long oblivion. Mary Papke’s Susan Glaspell: A Research and Production Sourcebook (1993) allows us to trace the history of the dismissal and subsequent disappearance of Glaspell from the canon of American drama. Beginning around 1940, derogatory remarks by such influential theater commentators as George Jean Nathan and Burns Mantle appear to have had a significant impact on Glaspell’s standing; the Gelb biography of Eugene O’Neill (1960), which helped cement his placement as the American playwright of the early half of the century, “cast Glaspell as a very secondary character in that drama,” in the words of Papke’s apt summary (212).1 Such criticism quite radically overturned earlier opinion. At the height of Glaspell’s theatrical creativity she was held to be one of the American theater’s leading figures, if not its shining light. Ludwig Lewisohn wrote in 1932: “Susan Glaspell was followed by Eugene O’Neill. The rest was silence; the rest is silence still” (Expression 398). The unintended irony of Lewisohn’s sense of “silence,” in terms of her elimination from the rankings of major American dramatists less than a decade after his Expression in America appeared, resonates with the fate of any number of women writers recently rescued from obscurity. In the case of Glaspell we can trace the resurgence of interest in her writing in major part to the scholarship of Mary Anne Ferguson, who reprinted Glaspell’s short story “A Jury of Her Peers” in her extremely influential anthology Images of Women in Literature (1973), which was one of the early key texts for feminist criticism in the United States. Ferguson’s collection prompted seminal critical writing on Glaspell by Judith Fetterley and Annette Kolodny, among others. Sandra Introduction ✧✧✧✧✧✧✧ Gilbert and Susan Gubar then chose to include the one-act Trifles, the drama Glaspell wrote about the same murder case a year before the story version appeared , in their Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (1985), a text that, like all Norton editions, serves as a vehicle for the canonization of both writers and individual works. Within the field of feminist theater studies Helen Krich Chinoy and Linda Walsh Jenkins accomplished a similar goal with their groundbreaking Women in American Theatre (1981), which featured several essays focusing on Glaspell.2 Although Papke’s Sourcebook documents a steady stream of published references to Glaspell from the 1910s forward, my concern here is to highlight those works and commentators who may have had the most significant influence on the overall standing of Glaspell in the theater and in the academy. One of the noticeable trends in writing on Glaspell since the 1970s is the predominance of scholarship emanating from the field of women’s studies. While feminist criticism has unquestionably rescued Glaspell from literary and theatrical obscurity, its success is double-edged. With Glaspell, as with many artists championed by criticism grounded in the politics of identity (African American studies, queer theory, Asian American studies, to give just a few other examples), a tension lingers between her status in the field that rediscovered her and in the academic mainstream. The latter has been slower to embrace such figures. When it does so, their location within fields of inquiry often remains linked to their positionality, as token representatives of their group, or their work is compared to that of canonical figures. While, for example, C. W. E. Bigsby’s widely known Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama (1982) has helped introduce Glaspell to an entire generation of students and scholars alike, the way Bigsby positions her speaks volumes about the (re)placement of women writers in the canon: Besides Eugene O’Neill, the Provincetown Players produced one major talent in Susan Glaspell. Her work is in many ways more controlled than O’Neill’s. Her style is more reticent. . . . Yet she shared her husband’s visionary drive, his...

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