Fidelity (1915) is a classic that should be put beside books by writers such as Edith Wharton and Willa Cather; yet the novels of Susan Glaspell, who was once considered America's greatest living playwright apart from Eugène O'Neill (and who is best-known for her short play, 'Trifles') have been ignored. Set in Iowa in 1900 and in 1913, this dramatic and deeply moral novel uses complex but subtle use of flashback to describe a girl named Ruth Holland, bored with her life at home, falling in love with a married man and running off with him; when she comes back more than a decade later we are shown how her actions have affected those around her. Ruth had taken another woman's husband and as such 'Freeport' society thinks she is 'a human being who selfishly - basely - took her own happiness, leaving misery for others. She outraged society as completely as a woman could outrage it... One who defies it - deceives it - must be shut out from it.' But, like Emma Bovary, Edna Pontellier in 'The Awakening' and Nora in 'A Doll's House' Ruth has 'a diffused longing for an enlarged experience... Her energies having been shut off from the way they had wanted to go, she was all the more zestful for new things from life...' It is these that are explored in Fidelity.
Author
Susan Keating Glaspell (July 1, 1876 – July 27, 1948) was an American Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, actress, director, novelist, biographer and poet. She was a founding member of the Provincetown Players, one of the most important collaboratives in the development of modern drama in the United States. She also served in the Works Progress Administration as Midwest Bureau Director of the Federal Theater Project. Her novels and plays are committed to developing deep, sympathetic characters, to understanding 'life' in its complexity. Though realism was the medium of her fiction, she was also greatly interested in philosophy and religion. Many of her characters make principled stands. As part of the Provincetown Players, she arranged for the first ever reading of a play by Eugene O'Neill.
