Fidelity

PREFACE BY NICOLA BEAUMAN
384pp
ISBN 9780953478033

Fidelity (1915) is a classic of early feminist literature that should be put beside books by writers such as Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Charlotte Perkins Gilman or Kate Chopin. Set in Iowa in 1900 and in 1913, this dramatic and deeply moral novel uses complex but subtle use of flashback to describe a girl named Ruth Holland, bored with her life at home, who falls in love with a married man and runs off with him; when she comes back more than a decade later we are shown how her actions have affected those around her.

Ruth had taken another woman's husband and as such 'Freeport' society thinks she is '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 – deceives it – must be shut out from it.' But, like Emma in Madame Bovary, Edna Pontellier in The Awakening and Nora in A Doll's House, Ruth has 'a diffused longing for an enlarged experience... Her energies having been shut off from the way they had wanted to go, she was all the more zestful for new things from life...' It is these themes that are explored in Fidelity. This is a novel impossible to stop reading: right until the last page we do not know how it will end. 

Today Susan Glaspell is primarily known for her plays (the most famous is 'Trifles' and she won a Pulitzer prize for 'Alison's House'), but in our view she is one of the most important American novelists of the twentieth century. 

Endpaper

The endpapers show a Log Cabin quilt, now in a museum in England, sewn in the late nineteenth century near Iowa; the red pieces are an echo of the Sangré de Cristo mountains in Colorado, where Ruth is exiled.

Picture Caption

Susan Glaspell in 1913