Unveiling the Garden of Love: Mystical Symbolism in Layla Majnun & Gita Govinda Book

A friend told me there was a successful woman playwright in America in the early 20th Century. As a sometime theater reviewer, I was astonished I had never heard of Susan Glaspell, writer of plays, short stories, memoirs, and novels, co-founder of the Provincetown Players, and mentor to playwright Eugene O'Neill. She won a Pulitzer, she was instrumental in the Federal Theater under FDR. She mapped the transition of women from traditional roles in the background of their menfolk to having some fulfillment of their own. The irony of her disappearance is perfect.

I was fascinated by the biographer's descriptions and details. A beautifully written piece of work! The plots of Glaspell's stories sound a little to grim for my taste, but I want to find one of the out-of-print books just to see her style, said to be talky, cerebral, and -- in the plays -- cutting-edge experimental.

Her life itself is the plot that intrigues me most. Writing over and over about women struggling for "by-myself-ness" and some kind of personal achievement -- while propping up their less competent, needier men -- she went straight to the top of best-seller lists and her peers' lists of literary accomplishment, while letting the men in her life walk all over her. She did not seem to see that she was allowing that. She had one foot in the future and one in the Victorian world of her predecessors. Fascinating.