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Abstract
Another welcome addition to Glaspell scholarship is Patricia Bryan and Thomas Wolf's Midnight Assassin, a study of the 1901 murder trial of Margaret Hossack, which Glaspell covered as a young journalist and on which she based her most famous play (Trifles) and short story ("A Jury of Her Peers"). Moreover, evidence that Mr. Hossack had repeatedly threatened, hit, and thrown objects at his wife, which a defense attorney today might find useful in creating sympathy among the jurors for his client, was downplayed by Mrs. Hossack's lawyer, keenly aware that his jury of conservative Iowa farmers would construe any neighbor's testimony about domestic violence in the Hossack household as private familial business that should not be shared with outsiders and as stronger evidence of Mrs. Hossack's motive for murder than of Mr. Hossack's reprehensible behavior.