Just finished reading this book. It is about the impact that a young woman's affair with a married man has on a small community in Iowa in 1915. It is so modern in its attitudes to sex and adultery. At the end the heroine finally gets the Chance to marry the man she has been living with but turns her back on him and goes by herself to New York to start a new life.The main thing she wants in her life is to be "Moving On" something I should probably be doing a bit more.
Review here from the Persephone web site.
Fidelity (1915) is a classic that should be put beside books by writers such as Edith Wharton and Willa Cather; yet the novels of Susan Glaspell, who was once considered America's greatest living playwright apart from Eugène O'Neill (and who is best-known for her short play, 'Trifles') have been ignored.
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, falling in love with a married man and running 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.'
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