Jury Of Her Peers By Susan Glaspell Analysis

At age 24 in December of 1900, Susan Glaspell, a legislative reporter for the Des Moines Daily News at the time was employed to cover the highly sensationalized murder of John Hossack. His wife Margaret Hossack had been the prime suspect and was in fact convicted of the crime and sentenced. However, one year after her incarceration, her conviction was over turned and the second trial in 1903 resulted in a hung jury. She was never retried and the case remains unsolved to this day. After the case ended Susan Glaspell quit journalism to pursue a career in fiction. She moved to Cape Cod with her husband, also a writer, where they founded the Providencetown players as a place to help encourage playwrights. It was during this time she developed the play, possibly because she was surrounded by other inspirational playwrights.

The play was written in 1915, 15 years after she had covered the murder for the Des Moines Daily News. Then just a short year later she would turn out her short story “A Jury of Her Peers” based on the play. (The Library of America, 179). The play and the story are very similar. They both had the same plot, characters, settings, even the same dialogue. These two pieces are so similar in fact that it seems hard to differentiate the two and understand why Susan Glaspell felt the need to write both of them so close together. It is in the subtle differences that the story opens up more to the reader and becomes much larger than its small size. Both pieces are complementary to one another and should be examined when studying this writer and her contribution with these pieces of