SOURCE: “‘The Law is the Law—and a Bad Stove is a Bad Stove’: Subversive Justice and Layers of Collusion in ‘A Jury of Her Peers,’” in Violence, Silence, and Anger: Women's Writings as Transgression, edited by Deirdre Lashgari, University Press of Virginia, 1995, pp. 203–18.

In the following essay, Hallgren demonstrates how readers of “A Jury of Her Peers” are meant to collude with Glaspell-as-narrator in the same ways the female characters band together to mete out justice.

Susan Glaspell's 1917 short story “A Jury of Her Peers” has been quietly stunning women readers since its reappearance in a feminist anthology nearly twenty years ago. A novelist and playwright who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1931 for her novel Alison's House, Glaspell had been all but forgotten until her story was reprinted in Lee R. Edwards and Arlyn Diamond's American Voices, American Women. On the surface a detective story about two...