Plays — Reading Notes

(0 User reviews) 286

In Category - Science Fiction Utopias

Authors: Glaspell, Susan, 1882?-1948 Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2004 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: American drama Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

Edition facts

Words 62,201

Reading time 271 min

Text sections 7

This digital edition of Plays — Reading Notes is described by source-level measurements including 62,201 words, 4 hr 31 min estimated reading time, and 7 detected text sections.

The text analysis averages about 11.4 words per sentence, while the detected sections provide another way to judge how the source is divided.

Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “American drama,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.

Source: Project Gutenberg record #10623

Susan Glaspell's collection of four plays—Trifles, The Outside, The Verge, and Inheritors—showcases her early 20th-century dramatic voice through spare dialogue, symbolic settings, and characters who challenge social norms. The excerpts reveal a focus on domestic spaces as sites of hidden knowledge, women's silent resistance, and the tension between individual will and communal inheritance.

Editorial Edition Score 4.7/5

★★★★★ ★★★★★

Calculated from edition completeness, EPUB availability, text structure and catalogue metadata. Not a user rating.

How this score is calculated

Description quality20 pts
Title & short description10 pts
Source metadata20 pts
Text length15 pts
Chapters / structure15 pts
EPUB file integrity20 pts

Total of 100 points, scaled to a 2.5-5.0 range. Editions with an empty description or a missing EPUB file are not scored.

Edition quality

File: pg10623

Read the Text

She was going to put this in there, (_picks up loaf, then abruptly drops it. In a manner of returning to familiar things_) It's a shame about her fruit. I wonder if it's all gone. (_gets up on the chair and looks_) I think there's some here that's all right, Mrs Peters. Yes--here; (_holding it toward the window_) this is cherries, too. (_looking again_) I declare I believe that's the only one. (_gets down, bottle in her hand. Goes to the sink and wipes it off on the outside_) She'll feel awful bad after all her hard work in the hot weather. I remember the afternoon I put up my cherries last summer.

(_She puts the bottle on the big kitchen table, center of the room. With a sigh, is about to sit down in the rocking-chair. Before she is seated realizes what chair it is; with a slow look at it, steps back. The chair which she has touched rocks back and forth_.)

MRS PETERS: Well, I must get those things from the front room closet, (_she goes to the door at the right, but after looking into the other room, steps back_) You coming with me, Mrs Hale? You could help me carry them.

(_They go in the other room; reappear,_ MRS PETERS _carrying a dress and skirt,_ MRS HALE _following with a pair of shoes._)

MRS PETERS: My, it's cold in there.

(_She puts the clothes on the big table, and hurries to the stove._)

MRS HALE: (_examining the skirt_) Wright was close. I think maybe that's why she kept so much to herself. She didn't even belong to the Ladies Aid. I suppose she felt she couldn't do her part, and then you don't enjoy things when you feel shabby. She used to wear pretty clothes and be lively, when she was Minnie Foster, one of the town girls singing in the choir. But that--oh, that was thirty years ago. This all you was to take in?

MRS PETERS: She said she wanted an apron. Funny thing to want, for there isn't much to get you dirty in jail, goodness knows. But I suppose just to make her feel more natural. She said they was in the top drawer in this cupboard. Yes, here. And then her little shawl that always hung behind the door. (_opens stair door and looks_) Yes, here it is.

(_Quickly shuts door leading upstairs._)

MRS HALE: (_abruptly moving toward her_) Mrs Peters?

MRS PETERS: Yes, Mrs Hale?

MRS HALE: Do you think she did it?

MRS PETERS: (_in a frightened voice_) Oh, I don't know.

MRS HALE: Well, I don't think she did. Asking for an apron and her little shawl. Worrying about her fruit.

MRS PETERS: (_starts to speak, glances up, where footsteps are heard in the room above. In a low voice_) Mr Peters says it looks bad for her. Mr Henderson is awful sarcastic in a speech and he'll make fun of her sayin' she didn't wake up.

MRS HALE: Well, I guess John Wright didn't wake when they was slipping that rope under his neck.

MRS PETERS: No, it's strange. It must have been done awful crafty and still. They say it was such a--funny way to kill a man, rigging it all up like that.

MRS HALE: That's just what Mr Hale said. There was a gun in the house. He says that's what he can't understand.

MRS PETERS: Mr Henderson said coming out that what was needed for the case was a motive; something to show anger, or--sudden feeling.

MRS HALE: (_who is standing by the table_) Well, I don't see any signs of anger around here, (_she puts her hand on the dish towel which lies on the table, stands looking down at table, one half of which is clean, the other half messy_) It's wiped to here, (_makes a move as if to finish work, then turns and looks at loaf of bread outside the breadbox. Drops towel. In that voice of coming back to familiar things._) Wonder how they are finding things upstairs. I hope she had it a little more red-up up there. You know, it seems kind of sneaking. Locking her up in town and then coming out here and trying to get her own house to turn against her!

MRS PETERS: But Mrs Hale, the law is the law.

MRS HALE: I s'pose 'tis, (_unbuttoning her coat_) Better loosen up your things, Mrs Peters. You won't feel them when you go out.

(MRS PETERS _takes off her fur tippet, goes to hang it on hook at back of room, stands looking at the under part of the small corner table_.)

Continue Reading →

Susan Glaspell's Plays opens with Trifles, a one-act play that immediately establishes a kitchen as a crime scene. The stage directions describe a “gloomy kitchen” left “without having been put in order,” with unwashed pans and a loaf of bread outside the bread-box. This domestic disorder is not mere backdrop; it becomes evidence. The men—County Attorney, Sheriff, and Hale—enter as official investigators, while the women, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale, linger near the door, physically and symbolically marginal. The men dismiss the kitchen as trifling, but the women's attention to the unfinished work—the bread left out, the quilt—will prove central. Glaspell uses this split perspective to question whose observations matter and what constitutes a clue.

The Kitchen as Evidence

In Trifles, the kitchen is not a neutral setting but a character in the investigation. The men see only disorder; the women see a story. Mrs. Hale notices the bread outside the box and the dish-towel on the table, details the County Attorney dismisses as “trifles.” Yet these signs of interrupted labor hint at the emotional state of Minnie Wright, the absent wife. The women piece together a narrative of isolation and despair from the quilt—one block sewn “queerly”—and the empty birdcage. Glaspell forces the reader to weigh the men's legal evidence against the women's empathetic knowledge. The kitchen becomes a space where power and gender collide, and where the smallest objects carry the heaviest weight.

Voice and Silence in The Outside

The Outside shifts from a farmhouse to a remote station on the dunes, where the characters speak in clipped, hesitant phrases. The dialogue is sparse, often interrupted by stage directions that emphasize gesture over speech. One character says, “I'm not—cold,” echoing Mrs. Peters's earlier denial, suggesting a pattern of withholding. The setting itself—a house “outside” the town—mirrors the characters' emotional exile. Glaspell uses the physical environment, such as the wind and the sand, to externalize internal conflict. The play's structure relies on what is unsaid, making the reader attend to pauses and movements as much as words.

The Verge: Breaking Forms

The Verge pushes further into experimental territory. The protagonist, Claire, speaks in fragmented, almost poetic lines: “Out. (a little like a child's pleased surprise) Out.” The stage directions become lyrical, describing her voice as “feeling the way” toward the hymn “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” The play's climax involves a death that is both violent and transcendent, with Claire's final words dissolving into song. Glaspell breaks conventional dramatic structure, using repetition and ellipsis to convey a mind straining beyond limits. The reader must navigate a text where punctuation and spacing carry meaning, and where characters seem to exist on the edge of language itself.

Inheritors: History on Stage

Inheritors opens in 1879 on a farmhouse “on the rolling prairie just back from the Mississippi.” The stage is filled with objects of pioneer life: a homemade table, braided rugs, a picture of Abraham Lincoln. The dialogue immediately establishes generational tension: Grandmother Morton complains that “the worst of a war—you have to go on hearing about it so long.” The play spans decades, introducing a large cast that includes a Hungarian exile, a banker, and college students. Glaspell uses the setting to explore how the past shapes the present, and how ideals of freedom and ownership are inherited—and contested. The opening scene's homey details contrast with the political conflicts that will unfold, grounding abstract themes in tangible objects.

Reading these plays in sequence reveals Glaspell's evolving craft: from the tight realism of Trifles to the symbolic landscapes of The Outside, the expressionist daring of The Verge, and the historical sweep of Inheritors. Pay attention to what is left unsaid—the pauses, the unfinished sentences, the objects that speak louder than words. Glaspell's characters often resist easy explanation, and her plays reward rereading with new layers of meaning.

There’s something so particular about Glaspell’s quiet rooms and the way her women hold their truths. It brought to mind an older volume, A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume 03 — Text and Context, where that same, older silence lingers. Both feel like houses where much was said between the lines, and I’m still thinking about them.