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Susan Glaspell's play Trifles (1916) or the short story she based on it, "Jury of Her Peers" (1917), may be found today in almost every anthology introducing college students to literature, yet it seems strange that a woman who wrote nine novels and over fifty short stories, in addition to fourteen plays, is still mainly known, when known at all, for one short dramatic work. Feminist critics such as Christine Dymkowski and Linda Ben-Zvi, among others, are in the process of resurrecting Glaspell's reputation and establishing that she is "one of the two most accomplished playwrights of twentieth-century America" (Dymkowski 91). But although this work is invaluable, attention continues to be focused almost solely on Glaspell's drama, to the exclusion of her novels. Veronica Makowsky's recent study provides the first scholarly feminist analysis of Glaspell's entire oeuvre, from her early stories to her late novels, but even Makowsky appears to agree with the standard view, which is in my opinion not sufficiently substantiated, that Glaspell's plays are her "greatest work" (24).
Glaspell's first novel, Glory of the Conquered, was published in 1909; her second, The Visioning, in 1911; and her third, Fidelity, in 1915. In 1913 she married George Cram Cook, an idealistic, bohemian fellow Iowan. They moved to New York and summered in Provincetown, Massachusetts. They were both instrumental in creating the Provincetown Players and in establishing the group in Greenwich Village. Despite the fact that she spent most of the 1920s writing plays for the Provincetown theater and did not return to the novel form until 1928 with Brook Evans, Glaspell "always considered herself a writer of fiction" and, as she recalled in a later autobiographical fragment, "I began writing plays because my husband forced me to" (Noe 33). Later, after she and Cook had left New York for a two-year sojourn in Greece, she confided in a letter to her mother that "the theater has always made it hard for me to write and now I will have a better chance for my own writing" (Noe 49). Although her play Alison's House won the Pulitzer Prize in 1931, and she served briefly as Midwest director for the Federal Theatre Project in Chicago during 1934, she basically settled in Provincetown after Cook's death...