Susan Glaspell

Susan Glaspell – Life, Career, and Resonant Quotes

Dive into the life and legacy of Susan Glaspell (1876–1948), American playwright, novelist, and pioneer of feminist modern drama. Discover her biography, seminal works like Trifles, her influence, and her enduring voice through her own words.

Introduction

Susan Keating Glaspell was an American playwright, novelist, journalist, and actress, whose literary and theatrical work helped shape early 20th-century American drama and feminist discourse. Born on July 1, 1876, and passing on July 28, 1948, she bridged journalism, fiction, and stage in a career distinguished by moral subtlety, psychological insight, and a commitment to women’s perspectives. Although her reputation waned mid-century, scholars and theatre practitioners have revived her voice: today, Trifles (and its parallel story A Jury of Her Peers) is a staple in American drama curricula.

In this article, we trace Glaspell’s life, creative development, major contributions, legacy, personality, and a collection of her most striking quotes. Through her journey, we glimpse the evolution of American theater, feminist consciousness, and the struggle of a woman artist forging her own path.

Early Life and Family

Susan Keating Glaspell was born on July 1, 1876, in Davenport, Iowa, to Alice Keating and Elmer Glaspell.

Her early years were marked by a rural upbringing along the Mississippi River bluffs. The family homestead was once rural frontier land; her great-grandfather purchased that land following the Black Hawk Purchase.

In 1893, her father sold their farm, and the family moved into Davenport, as the surrounding region urbanized.

Youth, Education & Early Professional Steps

At age 18, Glaspell began working as a journalist in her hometown, which was rare for women at the time. She wrote for local papers in Davenport, eventually handling “Society” columns and legal/crime coverage.

She entered Drake University in Des Moines and from there graduated with a degree in philosophy.

Immediately after graduation, Glaspell worked full-time as a reporter for the Des Moines Daily News. She covered legislative sessions and criminal trials—another unusual assignment for a woman journalist of her era.

At age 24, after investigating a murder trial involving a woman defendant, she resigned and refocused her energies on fiction and drama.

In 1909 she published her first novel, The Glory of the Conquered, which gained praise and marked her arrival as a novelist. The Visioning (1911) and later Fidelity (1915).

Career and Major Contributions

Founding the Provincetown Players & Early Theater Work

In 1913, she married George Cram Cook, a fellow writer and dramatist.

By 1915, Glaspell and Cook, along with friends, helped found the Provincetown Players, considered the first modern American theater company. They began staging new, experimental plays in Provincetown, Massachusetts, often rejecting commercial formulas.

Her first significant theatrical success was Trifles (1916), a one-act play based on a murder case she had reported in Iowa. Trifles dramatizes how women’s perspectives, often dismissed, uncover crucial clues. It remains a celebrated feminist classic. A Jury of Her Peers (1917).

Over the 1910s and 1920s, she produced plays such as Inheritors (1921), The Verge (1921), Close the Book (1917), The Outside (1917), and others. Alison’s House (1930) won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1931, giving her major recognition.

One of her notable theatrical works, Inheritors, explores legacy, free speech, and moral tension in a Midwestern setting.

In The Outside (1917), she explores emotional isolation using symbolism: Mrs. Patrick, living in an abandoned life-saving station, is visited by others who bring a drowned body to her threshold, stirring ghosts of her past.

Later Career, Shifts & Challenges

After Cook’s death in 1924 (while in Greece), Glaspell returned to the U.S. and published a biography of him, The Road to the Temple (1927). Brook Evans (1928), Fugitive’s Return (1929), Ambrose Holt and Family (1931) — which she considered personally important.

During the Great Depression, she moved to Chicago and became Midwest Bureau Director for the Federal Theatre Project under the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

Her later novels, such as The Morning Is Near Us (1939), Norma Ashe (1942), and Judd Rankin's Daughter (1945), reflected deeper psychological and spiritual concerns, often in Midwestern settings.

Unfortunately, as theatrical tastes changed and mid-20th-century critics marginalized her style, Glaspell’s reputation declined after her death.

Historical & Cultural Context

Glaspell’s career falls at a transformative moment in American cultural life: the Progressive Era, World War I, the Jazz Age, and the Depression. Her early theater work was part of a broader avant-garde impulse to break away from formulaic commercial theater toward socially engaged, intimate drama.

Her experience as a female journalist covering crime and law in the early 1900s gave her direct insight into systems of authority and gender bias—insight she transposed into her dramatizations.

As social attitudes shifted in the mid-1900s, her focus on women’s interior lives, gender justice, and moral nuance had minimal place in commercial theater trends dominated by spectacle and conformity. Only later did feminist literary scholars recover her work.

Her founding role in the Provincetown Players also linked her to the American Little Theatre movement, which sought alternative, experimental theatrical outlets outside Broadway’s commercial constraints.

Legacy and Influence

Today, Susan Glaspell is recognized as one of the early American playwrights whose work advanced feminist consciousness in drama. She is often enrolled now among “rediscovered” women authors whose voices were marginalized in mid-century canons.

Trifles remains among the most frequently anthologized and performed plays in American theater courses. A Jury of Her Peers is widely taught in literature and women’s studies contexts.

Her influence is also felt in how later playwrights and critics conceptualize drama from a woman’s point of view: her plays emphasize microcosms of domestic life to reveal power, silence, and moral judgment.

The International Susan Glaspell Society was founded to promote her recognition and scholarship.

Michael Billington, a noted British theatre critic, once called her “American drama’s best-kept secret.”

Personality, Talents & Approach

Glaspell combined modesty with intellectual resolve. She did not seek flamboyant spectacle; she trusted the everyday, dialogues, silences, and small emotional shifts.

Her skills spanned journalism, fiction, dramatic structure, and acting. She sometimes acted in her own plays, and contemporaries noted that when she took the stage, “the audience came alive.”

She resisted being pigeonholed as merely a “woman writer.” While gender themes permeate her work, she always aimed for universality of ethical tension.

Her temperament included resilience: she endured personal tragedies (Cook’s death), health struggles, creative droughts, and shifts in public taste — but she continued writing and serving in the arts until late in life.

Her writing style tends to be economical, psychologically sharp, and aware of what is unsaid — a fitting mode for a woman dramatist exploring silence, marginality, and interior life.

Memorable Quotes by Susan Glaspell

Here are some of her more resonant lines, drawn from plays, stories, essays, and speeches:

• “We all go through the same things – it’s all just a different kind of the same thing.”

• “The facts of another's life do not illumine. Only when we know the heart can we know that life.”

• “They made small effort to cover their raw souls with the mantle of commonplace words.”

• “Defeat furnishes good material to the poets and the artists, but none of us care to have the glory of the conquered apply to us.”

• “A clock is a little machine that shuts us out from the wonder of time.”

• “There is good and there is bad in every human heart, and it is the struggle of life to conquer the bad with the good.”

• “We don’t see the Bible as it is itself. We see it in relation to a lot of people who surround it.”

• “I am glad I worked on a newspaper because it made me know I had to write whether I felt like it or not.”

These quotes highlight her sensitivity to inner life, the constraints imposed by language, moral struggle, and the tension between what is visible and what lies beneath.

Lessons from Susan Glaspell

• Elevate the margins. Glaspell turned domestic spaces and ignored clues into dramatic battlegrounds for moral insight.

• Write from observation, not abstraction. Her journalist’s eye sharpened her dramatist’s sense.

• Speak the unsaid. Her plays often hinge on silence, omission, and what characters fail to voice.

• Stay resilient through obscurity. Her reputation waned before being revived — a reminder that impact can lie dormant.

• Blend genres and roles. She moved across journalism, fiction, drama, and acting — refusing strict boundaries.

• Use small scale to reveal large truths. In Trifles, the quiet kitchen is the site of social justice.

Conclusion

Susan Glaspell’s life and work bridge journalism and drama, realism and subtext, women’s insight and universal moral tension. Though once overshadowed, her influence is now being reclaimed: she stands among the important American dramatists who dared to listen to women’s voices, to dramatize moral nuance, and to make silence speak.

Her works—especially Trifles, Alison’s House, and her short stories — remain powerful, provoking, and worthy of revival. Her quotes continue to echo: about the heart, about defeat, about time, about what is hidden beneath the everyday.