Susan Glaspell's century of American women: a critical interpretation of her work

Abstract

As a female writer in the shadow of the cultural nimbus generated by her male peers, and as a transcendentalist in the spirit of Emerson among modernists, Susan Glaspell has suffered from literary obscurity from the start. An accomplished playwright, and co-founder of the Provincetown Players, Glaspell created self-reliant female heroines in works which were often dismissed as experimental by her colleagues. Makowsky's engagingly written study, by focusing on the women of Glaspell's writing and their struggles with the issues of motherhood and social limitation, seeks to vindicate Susan Glaspell and to offer her work to the attention of a new generation of readers. At the same time, Makowsky offers a valuable and topical inquiry into the nature of the cultural and political forces that shape our perceptions of literary greatness and, ultimately, the canon.