Fidelity

By Susan Glaspell

April 14, 2026

A classic feminist novel originally published in 1915, and set in Iowa in the early years of the 20th century, Susan Glaspell's Fidelity is a surprising, suspenseful work about the strictures that confine women, the risks those who want to flee them take, and the opportunities that await them if they do. 

Ruth Holland, bored in her conventional small town, falls in love with a married man and runs off with him, shocking the community. A decade later she returns to cold shoulders and the disapproval of the town: she is seen as "a human being who selfishly – basely – took her own happiness, leaving misery for others. She outraged society as completely as a woman could outrage it... One who defies it...must be shut out from it." 

What Ruth decides to do next will upend most readers' expectations, as will the cryptic scenes that take place in the doctor's office after Ruth becomes involved with her married lover. Ruth Holland deserves to be placed alongside other heroines such as Emma Bovary and Lily Bart, women who wanted "an enlarged experience" and were "zestful for new things from life." Fidelity will shock and fascinate readers today as its heroine did in her day. 

With an introduction by Sarah Blackwood. Part of the Belt Revivals series. 

Susan Glaspell was the founder of America's first modern theater company, the Provincetown Players. She was born in a homestead in Davenport Iowa, and became a journalist at 18, where she wrote a column for the local newspaper lampooning society culture. She majored in philosophy at Drake College, and became the rare woman on staff at the Des Moines Daily News. At 24, she moved back home to focus on writing fiction; her work was readily accepted, and she received a cash prize for a short story that she used to move to Chicago. 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, they founded the Provincetown Playhouse, a famous theater company. Glaspell was best-known for her drama: she 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. 

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.