I just finished reading the upcoming Susan Glaspell collection Her America: A Jury of Her Peers and Other Stories that is due out in July from the Univer of Iowa Press. I had never heard of Glaspell before this book arrived on my doorstep and honestly I wasn't too inclined to give it much of a look. However, there was much to impress me in the last UI Press title I reviewed (When War Becomes Personal - see my Bookslut review) so I thought I would give it a shot.

And then I was blown away. Totally.

The collected stories are all from the WWI era - around 1915 to 1920 and were primarily published in Harper's. They are extremely human stories, almost entirely devoid of exceptional events and focused on how people interact with each other and the seemingly mundane moments of their lives. In the first story, "Looking After Clara" a rather typical young man with a very typical sort of office job (actually he sounds quite dull) is asked to do a favor by a young woman he met on a recent vacation and has been thinking about quite a bit since (he has sent her two letters!) She is in the city (Boston) and needs someone to care for her cat while she has a quick side trip to see a friend. Taking care of a cat seems like a small thing for Stephen to do in order to get into Dorothy's good graces and even though it means he must smuggle her into his rooming house (no pets allowed) really, what choice does he have? He will be a hero to this very lovely and highly marriageable girl and who knows what might happen after that? So he says yes! And he gets Clara! And Clara is one major pain in the ass cat!

It's all very funny and predictable and most decidedly screwball comedyesque and while nothing truly outrageous happens, seeing poor Stephen cope with something outside of his standard range of behavior is just fabulous. This is a story about a guy doing a bit of cat-sitting and that should make it one step up above a story about nothing but as we all know there's a wealth of funny in a story about inconsequential things if it is written well and Glaspell is one hella good writer. (You also wonder at just what point Stephen will accept that anyone who would have Clara for a pet is probably not wife material for him.)

The rest of the collection moves from funny to wry to deeply heartfelt, with all of the stories introducing characters one feels an immediate affinity towards and a conviction that this is how good writing can be when handled by someone who does not need tropes to get the words on the page. All of them are good reads but then there is the award winning story "A Jury of Her Peers" and that one is so incredible and I promise, you will never forget it.

Through the wonders of the internet you can read the whole story online right now. It is in the same vein as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's staggering The Yellow Wallpaper so if you are a fan of that one this impress you deeply. It tells the story of two women who have been charged with going to a neighbor's house to gather a few of her things after her husband has been found dead. The men involved (one of the women is the sheriff's wife) have suspicions that the wife killed him (she is being held for questioning) but they can not be sure and further, they can not imagine a woman being able to accomplish such a feat. So as the men prowl around considering the evidence and discussing the dead man, the two women, who do not know each other well, come to their own conclusion and make their own decision about what to do. It is a bare bones story - the whole thing takes place over an afternoon at the home of the dead man - and yet it is HUGE. It is everything about love and marriage, about what you can give and what can be taken away, about cruelty and grace and also a lot about women of a certain time (although I would argue that the message about women is, in fact, timeless). Go. Read "A Jury of Her Peers". It will take you fifteen minutes and you won't regret it, promise.

I'll have a full review of the book up later this summer at Bookslut (hopefully July). I'll also be ordering Glaspell's novels - Fidelity & Brook Evans both in print at the fabulous Persephone Books. (And if you are a Persephone fan, then Glaspell will strike you a lot like Dorothy Whipple.)

Thank you University of Iowa for releasing this title - and keeping a great American writer still in the public eye. (Do I ever wish I had read her in high school - the classroom discussions would have been amazing.)

[Post pic of Susan Glaspell at work]