A Chapter in Her Life, released in September 1923, marked Lois Weber’s return to filmmaking following her masterpiece The Blot (1921). In the interim, she had spent an extended sojourn in Europe and divorced her husband and long-term collaborator Phillips Smalley. Weber had adapted Clara Louise Burnham’s best-selling novel for the screen already once before for Jewel (1915). While Universal threw itself behind the production, A Chapter in Her Life was, as Weber expert Shelley Stamp concludes, “not a success. Critics praised [Weber’s] direction… but found the film’s subject matter out of step with the times.” (Lois Weber in Early Hollywood, University of California Press, 2015). Weber wouldn’t direct another film until The Marriage Clause (1926). A Chapter in Her Life exists today (more or less) complete, albeit in the form of inferior quality 16mm reduction prints. Only two short fragments from a contemporary Swiss distribution print are known to survive in the original 35mm format.

Oliver Hanley

A fragment of Weber’s 1923 feature A Chapter in Her Life, about a young girl’s quest to redeem a family burdened by alcoholism. Rejoining Universal after the collapse of her production company, Weber chose to adapt Clara Louise Burnham’s best-selling 1903 novel promoting Christian Science, a project she had first brought to the screen in her 1915 feature Jewel. While some critics complained of the film’s “saccharine Pollyanna theme” (“Variety”), Marcia Landy finds a powerful treatment of domesticity and interiority. “What we see in A Chapter in Her Life is a hermetic bourgeois world centering on imprisoned femininity, with fantasy and fairy tale used to portray emotional discontent” (Marcia Landy, 1923: Movies and the Changing Body of Cinema, in American Cinema of the 1920s: Themes and Variations, edited by Lucy Fischer, Rutgers University Press, 2009).