Fidelity

Sarah Blackwood is Professor of English at Pace University, where she teaches courses on nineteenth-century US literature, visual culture, and representations of selfhood. She is the author of The Portrait's Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States (2019), as well as the introductions to the Penguin Classics editions of Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country and The Age of Innocence and editor of The Norton Library edition of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. Her criticism has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and elsewhere. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.

Susan Glaspell was born in a homestead in Davenport, Iowa. She became a journalist at eighteen before getting a degree in philosophy at Drake College and becoming the rare woman on staff at the Des Moines Daily News. At twenty-four, she moved back home to focus on writing fiction. Her first novel, The Glory of the Conquered, became a bestseller in 1909. Glaspell fell in love with a married professor at the University of Iowa, George Cram Cook, who divorced his wife; they were married in 1913 and moved to Greenwich Village, where they became involved in the burgeoning avant-garde scene of the time. After spending a summer in Provincetown, Massachusetts, they founded the Provincetown Players, America's first modern theater company. Glaspell won the Pulitzer Prize for Trifles, published in 1916. Her theater company was hugely successful, though Glaspell always had financial difficulties. She died in Provincetown in 1948.