Susan Glaspell: A Critical Biography (review)

Susan Glaspell: A Critical Biography. By Barbara Ozieblo. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. 345 pp. $55.00/$22.50 paper.

Co-founder of the Provincetown Players, best-selling novelist, and Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, Susan Glaspell was nearly forgotten after her death in 1948. Early recovery work, begun in 1966 when Arthur Waterman published his Twayne series book, Susan Glaspell, was strengthened by Gerhard Bach's Susan Glaspell und die Provincetown Players: Die Aufange des modernen amerikanischen Dramas un Theatre (1979), and my own Susan Glaspell: Voice from the Heartland (1983). More recent works by Veronica Makowsky, Mary Papke, and Linda Ben-Zvi have helped to situate this daringly experimental and uncompromisingly idealistic writer within the canon.

In the new millennium, Barbara Ozieblo's thoroughly researched and beautifully written biography focuses on a question that has long intrigued me about Glaspell: "[w]hy the rebel in her chose so often to acquiesce to convention" (1). To answer it, Ozieblo examined fifty manuscript collections, several of them never before mined by Glaspell scholars, in twenty-eight different libraries, museums, and record offices. This exhaustive research project results in new information that illuminates Glaspell's relationships with her parents, her husband, her colleague Eugene O'Neill, her lover of eight years Norman Matson, her British publisher, and the fledgling playwright she mentored, Arnold Sundgaard. Ozieblo also expands our knowledge of Glaspell's early years in Davenport and Des Moines, her time with the Provincetown Players, O'Neill's literary debt to Glaspell, the British production and reception of her plays, and her Federal Theatre Project work.

The biographical component of the book is complemented by critical analyses of Glaspell's fiction and plays, some of which have been little discussed to date. These analyses contribute significantly to Glaspell scholarship; they are psychologically astute and well informed by knowledge of nineteenth-century women's fiction, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theatre history, and theories of theatre. Particularly noteworthy are Ozieblo's discussions of the strategies of accommodation Glaspell used to shape her stories for the readerships and political orientations of various mass-circulation magazines. Her discussion of Racine's Berenice as an intertext for Glaspell's little-known play, Bernice (1918), is also valuable.

While on the whole this book is meticulously researched and documented, I was bothered by Ozieblo's tendency to extrapolate about Glaspell's state of mind in situations where such information is unverifiable and to provide information about Glaspell's life without documentation. Sentences such as "Glaspell delighted in the writing of the play [Suppressed Desires]; it gave her the opportunity to work with her husband--thus keeping him away from the libations at the Liberal Club and the Brevoort" and "Moreover, Glaspell loved to hear O'Neill talk and to see the intense concentration build up in his gloomy eyes as he wrestled with her more optimistic view of life" sent me searching in vain through the footnotes (67-68, 121). And I'm very curious to know where Ozieblo obtained the information that The Comic Artist, billed as a joint venture of Glaspell and Norman Matson, "was conceived and written mostly by him" (234). In these and many other instances, either no source is cited or the source cited at paragraph's end could not possibly have yielded this kind of information. I'm uncomfortable with this blurring of the line between fact and fiction. And although the biography is marvelously detailed with respect to the first four decades of Glaspell's life, it devotes only thirty-six pages to the last two decades. Since Glaspell produced her best work during the Provincetown years, there is a valid reason for giving this period more space. Nevertheless, Ozieblo's discussion of the last eighteen years of Glaspell's life seems sketchy.

Having quibbled with Ozieblo's methodology, however, I must end by reiterating my strong admiration for her overall achievement. Susan Glaspell: A Critical Biography is the most thoroughgoing and insightful treatment of Glaspell...