Glaspell, Susan - Elaine Hedges (essay date 1986)
Elaine Hedges (essay date 1986)
[An American critic and educator, Hedges is the author of Land and Imagination: The Rural Dream in America (1980; with William L Hedges) and In Her Own Image: Women Working in the Arts (1980; with Ingrid Wendt).
In the essay below, she argues that a full understanding of the symbolism in Glaspell's story "A Jury of Her Peers" requires an academic reconstruction of women's social history in the nineteenth-century American West.]
Susan Glaspell's "A Jury of her Peers" is by now a small feminist classic. Published in 1917, rediscovered in the early 1970s and increasingly reprinted since then in anthologies and textbooks, it has become for both readers and critics a familiar and frequently revisited landmark on our "map of rereading." For Lee Edwards and Arlyn Diamond in 1973 it introduced us to the work of one of the important but forgotten women writers who were then being rediscovered; and its...
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