The original Victor Gollancz jacket, designed by Edward McKnight Kauffer in 1928

320p PERSEPHONE BOOKS ISBN 1903155169
WITH A PUBLISHER'S NOTE

The second Susan Glaspell novel we publish was the first-ever book published on the newly-launched Victor Gollancz list. Its description of the effects of two lovers' brief happiness on succeeding generations parallels Fidelity's focus on the immediate effects of an unsanctioned love affair : we see Naomi trying, misguidedly, to ensure that at least her daughter Brook (conceived beside a brook twenty years before) can be true to her passionate nature.

Like DH Lawrence, whose Lady Chatterley's Lover was also published in 1928, Susan Glaspell believed that society should respect the effects of passion instead of valuing it far less than the forces of respectability and economic security.

A film of Brook Evans, The Right to Love, was made in 1931, the year Susan Glaspell won the Pulitzer Prize for her play 'Alison's House'. One of our readers wrote: 'What an amazing book, brilliantly formed, incredibly moving and beautifully written. I think my favourite so far, I couldn't sleep or read anything else after I had finished it, just lay there feeling a bit stunned.'

The endpaper is a block-printed linen designed by a French architect in New York in 1928. The book, like the fabric, combines the traditional and the abstract and is set in both America and France.