Plays

About the book

This collection brings together Trifles, The Outside, The Verge, and Inheritors, showing several distinct scales of Susan Glaspell's drama. In Trifles, an investigation in a farmhouse kitchen reveals how differently the visitors understand the significance of domestic details. The Outside places withdrawal and renewed human contact against the landscape of a former coastal life-saving station. The Verge turns experimental plant cultivation into a setting for Claire's resistance to established forms, while Inheritors follows ideals of education and freedom across generations. The plays range from concentrated encounters to larger conflicts involving family and institutions. Their common force comes from what conventional observers fail to hear or see, and from the personal cost of challenging the categories through which others define a life.

• Gender and perception
• Freedom and conformity
• Inherited ideals

Why read it

Reading the four together reveals how Glaspell changes dramatic form to make exclusion and resistance visible.

English collection of Trifles, The Outside, The Verge, and Inheritors