Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times (review)

In her heyday (ca. 1910–1930), Susan Glaspell was one of the most notable literary figures of her generation, a best-selling novelist, critically acclaimed playwright, and cultural leader of an American avant-garde. After her death in 1948, however, Glaspell was quickly forgotten, and remained so until fairly recently. Despite steadily increasing scholarly attention (Ben-Zvi's is the fourth major study in the past five years to be devoted exclusively to Glaspell's life and work), the author's claim that Glaspell remains "virtually unknown" today (ix) is probably true. Only one of Glaspell's plays (the one-act Trifles) is regularly anthologized, productions of her plays are rare, her abundant oeuvre of fiction (nine novels and over fifty short stories) is almost completely neglected, and Glaspell herself is remembered chiefly for her role in supposedly discovering Eugene O'Neill. In this welcome addition to the burgeoning body of Glaspell scholarship, author Linda Ben-Zvi makes a persuasive case for Glaspell's significance to American cultural and social history as well as the timeliness of her works for contemporary readers and audiences.

Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times provides a thoroughly researched, richly detailed, and eminently readable analysis of Glaspell's professional rise from "society girl" reporting in her native Iowa to Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright of international fame, and an equally rich exploration of Glaspell's private life, including her marriage to the charismatic, iconoclastic George Cram ("Jig") Cook and her eight-year liaison with writer Norman Matson, seventeen years her junior. Ben-Zvi offers critical summaries of all of Glaspell's major works, including her nine novels, fourteen plays, and genre-blurring biography of Cook, The Road to the Temple.

Ben-Zvi has organized her narrative chronologically in four parts: part 1 recounts Glaspell's childhood, education, and career as a newspaper reporter in the Midwest; part 2, her premarital relationship with Jig Cook and early success as a fiction writer; part 3, her association with the Provincetown Players and marriage to Cook; and part 4, her relationship with Matson, her Pulitzer win, her association with the Federal Theatre Project, and her later novels. These sections are composed of twenty-nine brief, swiftly moving chapters, in the midst of which Ben-Zvi pauses for two "interludes" of slightly greater length, giving readers a bit more time to savor Glaspell's move to the bohemian mecca of Greenwich Village in the "joyous season" of 1913 (121), and her and Cook's expatriate sojourn in Greece from 1922 to 1924, an arguably less joyous but equally fascinating episode which culminates in Cook's death.

Born in Davenport, Iowa, in 1876, Susan Glaspell was, as Ben-Zvi writes, a "pioneer" (xii) in art and life, one of the first generation of American women to embrace socialism, feminism, and self-realization as a woman and a citizen. Glaspell's fictional counterparts in her novels, short stories, and plays were similarly strong women who "continually pushed against fixed boundaries" (xii). After graduation from Drake University in 1899 Glaspell embarked on a writing career, working for a few years as a reporter before turning to fiction. She became a popular short-story writer and published her first novel in 1909. For the next four years, she continued to publish novels and short stories, broadening her horizons through travel to Chicago, New York, Provincetown, and Europe. Exhibiting behavior that would characterize her life, Glaspell outraged convention and followed her heart by falling in love with a married man (Cook), becoming his third wife in 1913. Ben-Zvi's perspective on this relationship differs markedly from that of many Glaspell scholars who have viewed Glaspell's marriage to Cook, who drank to excess and was reputedly unfaithful, as inexplicable and/or damaging. Admitting in her preface that she too began her work with the belief that Glaspell was "obviously a victim, beset by patriarchal villains (O'Neill and Cook)" (xi), Ben-Zvi ultimately rejects the image of Glaspell as...