In April 1931, just a month before receiving the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for
Alison’s House, Susan Glaspell completed her sixth novel,
Ambrose Holt and Family, published in the U.S. by Frederick A. Stokes Co. and the U.K. by Victor Gollancz Ltd. The novel is a re-working of Glaspell’s play
Chains of Dew, written in 1920 and produced by the Provincetown Players in 1922. Inviting comparison to Ibsen’s Nora,
Chains of Dew’sDiantha (Dotty) Standish is a doll-wife, living in domestic comfort provided by her (presumably) self-sacrificing poet husband Seymore, who claims that he lives a bourgeois Midwest existence as a bank director for the sake of his wife, mother, and children. When Seymore’s Greenwich Village comrades (including a New Woman crusader for birth control with whom…
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Citation: Black, Cheryl. "Ambrose Holt and Family". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 14 September 2018 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=16009, accessed 22 November 2024.]
