The Visioning: A Novel

On her twenty-fifth birthday, Katie Wayneworth Jones stands in a golf bunker and takes stock of her life: the officer she's expected to marry, the social cage of her station, the creeping sense that something essential has been missed. Then she sees a young woman by the river, and everything shifts. Katie intervenes when she believes Verna Woods is about to take her own life, pulling her from the water and into an unexpected future. What begins as an act of compassion becomes something more profound as these two women from opposite ends of the social ladder find themselves bound together. Glaspell, a founding figure of American feminist drama and member of the Provincetown Players, wrote this novel in 1911 as a quiet radical act. She asks what happens when a woman chooses another woman over the life she's been assigned, and she refuses easy answers. The novel moves through Katie's world with clear eyes, examining the constraints of class, the loneliness of performing a role, and the strange liberation that comes from reaching across divides. It endures because it understands that sometimes the most important visioning is seeing someone the world has overlooked.