novel that can run with Billy Budd, The Spoils of Poynton, Seize the Day, or any other.”2 Every few years another writer or critic will weigh in, urging readers to “rediscover” Lewis as she has been rediscovered so many times before.
So what is it that gives The Wife of Martin Guerre such continuing interest? Much of it is rooted in Lewis’s portrait of Bertrande, a woman who grows steadily in confidence as the novel progresses, and who possesses a fierce moral sense that guides her actions even at great personal cost. Lewis’s portrayal of the legal system, while fascinating in its own right, also acts to amplify the moral issues at play. The law operates around questions of evidence, oftentimes incomplete or circumstantial, which nonetheless must be resolved by absolute conclusions of guilt or innocence. At the same time, the law often fails to address what is right, or what a woman like Bertrande knows in her heart to be true.
The strength of this conundrum has given The Wife of Martin Guerre a long life, extended by two popular film adaptations. The first film, a 1982 French version titled Le Retour de Martin Guerre, recognizes Lewis’s contribution to the story by giving her author’s credit. The second, a 1993 version titled Sommersby, resets the action to the American South during the upheaval of the Reconstruction period following the Civil War. Both films devote extended screen time to their famous male leads—Gerard Depardieu in the French version, Richard Gere in the American one—thus creating a story that is as much about the husband as it is about the wife. But Lewis felt that both the specific setting of The Wife of Martin Guerre and the focus on Bertrande’s decision making are critical parts of the novel’s essence. The strict Catholic morality of sixteenth-century France serves both as a guiding force for Bertrande and as a prison; once she believes she has committed adultery, as Lewis notes, “her way was laid out for her.”3 At the same time, The Wife of Martin Guerre is much more than a simple morality play. Bertrande struggles on many levels—against the limited roles afforded to her as a woman, against her husband in both subtle and forceful ways, and finally with her own knowledge of the man standing in front of her.
This close attention to an individual’s moral choices in the face of strange circumstance links The Wife of Martin Guerre with the two novels that follow in the Cases of Circumstantial Evidence series. Though each of the novels stands on its own, they remain united by their shared origins in the history of law, discovered by Lewis in the same legal casebook where she first found the story of Bertrande de Rols and Martin Guerre. The setting shifts to seventeenth-century Denmark in The Trial of Sören Qvist, which focuses on a devoted parson, albeit one with a harsh temper, who is accused of killing one of his workers. Again the law closes in on a man who may or may not be guilty, and again the characters struggle as much with their own consciences and the changing times as they do with the ambiguous legal facts in front of them. In The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron, Lewis returns to France, this time during the reign of Louis XIV. In this longest and in some ways most complex of the three novels, a bookbinder becomes enmeshed in a political drama that spirals out of control—the king is denounced in a pamphlet, leading to criminal charges—but the real crime is domestic, an adulterous affair that contributes to the tragedy as much as the public trial that follows.
In each case Lewis focuses her rigorous but sympathetic eye on those trapped by the circumstances, particularly the women burdened by a system that gives most of its power to men. In his retrospective on Lewis’s career that appeared in the New York Review of Books, written the year of Lewis’s death, Larry McMurtry declares, “Reading the three novels in a line, from The Wife of Martin Guerre to The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron, is a powerful experience. Though all three were based on actual cases in the law, their power is literary not legal. . . . In each the ruin of an honest person is complete, and in each there is a fully and vividly realized woman who finds herself twisting helplessly in the dilemmas posed by love and duty.”4
Years after the initial publication of The Wife of Martin Guerre, Lewis continued to investigate the tragedy of Bertrande, consulting additional sources as they found their way to her. Likewise the novel itself traveled through several publishers and editions before finding a permanent home with Alan Swallow, founder of Swallow Press and longtime champion of Lewis’s husband Winters and other contemporary writers. Swallow claimed that in all his years selling The Wife of Martin Guerre and recommending it to friends, he “never found one who didn’t admire the work.”5 As for the truth behind the lives of Bertrande and Martin, Lewis herself notes simply, “In the end, many questions remain unanswered.”6 It is no wonder that novels of such enduring mystery could come from a woman with a long and fascinating life of her own.
The Life and Legacy of Janet Lewis
Janet Lewis was born in Chicago in 1898 and attended high school in Oak Park, where she and schoolmate Ernest Hemingway both contributed to the school literary magazine. Like Hemingway, she spent many youthful summers “up in Michigan,” a place that figures prominently in her short stories, much as it does in his. But whereas her more famous classmate is associated with hard living, literary stardom, and an early, self-inflicted death, Janet Lewis embodies a very different path.
She attended the University of Chicago, where she majored in French, and after her graduation left for Paris (“without waiting to pick up her diploma,” one biographer notes), residing there for six months, not quite long enough to become enmeshed in the expatriate literary scene with which the city is so strongly associated.7 Shortly after returning home she contracted tuberculosis, the disease that felled so many artists and nearly killed her as well. (Many years later, she told an interviewer, “There was a moment, be cheerful or die. You take your choice.”)8
Despite the life-threatening illness in her youth, she went on to live an impressive ninety-nine years, most of those years in the same house in the hills of Northern California where she and her husband, the poet Yvor Winters, raised their two children. Her ability to balance her domestic life—by all accounts, she enjoyed a remarkably happy marriage—with decades of literary output gives her an image that is simultaneously traditional and feminist. In her book Silences, Tillie Olsen cites Lewis as a clear example of a talented woman writer whose literary production was inhibited by her obligations to family and to a more famous husband. Lewis acknowledged the challenges of balancing her familial responsibilities with her writing. “I do think those women who have turned out an enormous amount of work were generally not women who had children,” she allowed in an early interview.9 But at the same time she publicly and explicitly rejected Olsen’s characterization of her, perhaps unwilling to see her family and her writing in conflict. “Being a writer has meant nearly everything to me beyond my marriage and children,” she told an interviewer in 1983.10 The remark is Lewis distilled. She foregrounds her marriage and her family. Beyond that, everything is about her writing.
As a poet, she met early success, publishing a four-poem sequence called “Cold Hills” in Poetry in 1920, before she had even finished college. A couple of years later, she moved into prose as well, publishing her first story in another influential magazine, The Bookman. Her first book of poems, The Indian in the Woods, was published in 1922 by the short-lived imprint Manikin, whose entire publishing history consists of three books: one by Lewis, one by William Carlos Williams, and one by Marianne Moore. It was just the beginning of a lifetime of close association with literary greatness, both personally and professionally.
A decade after her first book of poems, a period during which she got married and she and Winters both recovered from tuberculosis, she published her first novel, The Invasion, her first foray into historical fiction. Subtitled A Narrative of Events Concerning the Johnston Family of St. Mary’s, it is set in the Great Lakes region and tells the story of an Irish immigrant who marries an Ojibway woman.
Almost ten years after that, she published her acknowledged masterpiece, The Wife of Martin Guerre, marrying her eye for history with the peculiarities of the legal system that would give her the platform from which to explore powerful questions of morality and personal responsibility that fuel the three Cases of Circumstantial Evidence.
To European critics, Lewis seems quintessentially
