The Monist Society

Abstract In 1904, exactly at the time that Jig’s marriage was unraveling, Susan returned to Davenport from Chicago, moving back with her parents, brother Ray, and grandmother, Frank having left the previous winter for Lewiston, Montana, to try his hand at lumbering. Three years earlier she had come back to launch her writing career; this time she was already something of a celebrity, at least in her hometown. The Trident, the tricities’ weekly literary newspaper, edited by feminist Ella G. Bushnell-Hamlin was now referring to “Miss Susan Keating Glaspell” “prominent among Davenporters who are ‘doing things’ and coming to the front”; and by March 1905, when her grandmother Glaspell died, the obituaries referred to “the well known author Susan Glaspell.” Such praise was not unwarranted. She had already amassed an impressive publication record for her fiction and continued to do freelance work for Chicago newspapers, writing feature stories on regional political figures. However this growing reputation did not necessarily free her from conventional Davenport life. At home, her mother once more coddled and protected her, and her father bemusedly observed her progress. Even the news articles about her work struck a proprietary note, describing a bright girl whom “our city is proud to claim as her own.”