eBook - ePub
Cases of Circumstantial Evidence
Janet Lewis
This is a test
Share book
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
Cases of Circumstantial Evidence
Janet Lewis
Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations
About This Book
This is the first digital version of Cases of Circumstantial Evidence, a collection of three historical novels by noted American writer Janet Lewis. For the first time, these works have been brought together in a single edition, each with a new introduction by Kevin Haworth:
The Wife of Martin Guerre
Based on a notorious trial in sixteenth-century France, The Wife of Martin Guerre follows Bertrande de Rois and her lost-and-returned husband through a tale of impersonation, conspiracy, and small-town intrigue. Their fascinating story has also inspired a bestselling historical study and two films, including The Return of Martin Guerre.
The Trial of Sören Qvist
Although set in seventeenth-century Denmark, The Trial of Sören Qvist has a contemporary feel and has been praised for its intriguing plot and for Lewis's powerful writing. In this second novel in the Cases of Circumstantial Evidence, Lewis recounts the story of a murder, an investigation, and a pious town pastor who confesses to the crime, driven perhaps more by a recognition of his own moral flaws than by guilt for the acts of which he stood accused.
The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron
The court of Louis XIV and a modest Paris street provide the incongruous settings for this tale of a humble bookbinder, his wife, and the young craftsman who seduces her and blackmails her husband into covering up a terrible crime. This third and last case of circumstantial evidence bristles with character, the smell of blood, and considerable suspense against a backdrop of national political unrest in the cruel and dingy Paris of the seventeenth century.
Frequently asked questions
How do I cancel my subscription?
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlegoâs features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan youâll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, weâve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Cases of Circumstantial Evidence an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Cases of Circumstantial Evidence by Janet Lewis in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Historical Fiction. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Cases of Circumstantial Evidence
Swallow Press books by Janet Lewis
The Wife of Martin Guerre
The Trial of Sören Qvist
The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron
Good-Bye, Son and Other Stories
Poems Old and New, 1918â1978
Selected Poems of Janet Lewis
Cases of Circumstantial Evidence
The Wife of Martin Guerre
The Trial of Sören Qvist
The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron
Janet Lewis
Introduction by Kevin Haworth
Swallow Press
Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio
Swallow Press
An imprint of Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701
www.ohioswallow.com
The Wife of Martin Guerre © 1941, 1967 by Janet Lewis
The Trial of Sören Qvist © 1947, 1974 by Janet Lewis Winters
The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron © 1959, 1987 by Janet Lewis Winters
Introduction © 2013 by Swallow Press / Ohio University Press
All rights reserved
To obtain permission to quote, reprint, or otherwise reproduce or distribute material from Swallow Press / Ohio University Press publications, please contact our rights and permissions department at (740) 593-1154 or (740) 593-4536 (fax).
Introduction
The three Janet Lewis novels that together make up Cases of Circumstantial Evidence, gathered here in one edition for the first time, were originally published over the course of almost two decades. But together and separately, they explore themes consistent with their authorâs long and notable career. From the French countryside of The Wife of Martin Guerre, the most famous of Lewisâs novels, to The Trial of Sören Qvist, drawn from the tragic story of a parson well known in its native Denmark, to The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron, set in Louis XIVâs Paris, the three novels range widely in their historical settings but share essential questions of devotion, curiosity, and above all, the troubled intersection of the law and human morality.
Lewisâs Cases of Circumstantial Evidence novels build on her previous writing, particularly that of her first novel, The Invasion, set in America during the early nineteenth century and based on stories she heard in Michigan as a girl. In The Invasion, Lewis hewed closely to actual historical events and people for the skeleton on which to build her worldâa pattern she would follow in all her historical writing. Her allegiance to the real-life people and events was not born of mere convenience; the reclaiming and redeeming of seemingly minor figures in history, particularly women, was a key component of Lewisâs interest in writing. Part of the pleasure in reading these books is to discover why people act as they do within the complexities of their circumstances. âYou know what happens and to whom it happens,â Lewis explains in an interview with the Southern Review, speaking of the plots of her books and their basis in actual events. âBut why it happens, you donât know until you can get inside these people.â1
The characters and the respective legal entanglements of the three novels collected here are inspired most directly by Samuel March Phillipsâs 1874 legal casebook Famous Cases of Circumstantial Evidence, given to Lewis by her husband, the poet Yvor Winters. But Lewis may also have been motivated by a case closer to home: the 1933 trial of David Lamson, a sales manager for Stanford University Press, for the murder of his wife in their home in Palo Alto. The Lamson trial galvanized the Stanford community of which Lewis and Winters were a part, with Yvor Winters taking an active role in Lamsonâs defense through both public advocacy and consultations with Lamsonâs lawyers. With no witness to the crime, the case hinged on numerous readings of circumstantial evidence, from blood spatter to furniture layout to rumors of an affair. (Lamson was initially convicted but was later freed after multiple trials and appeals.2) During that time the Phillips casebook made its way into the Lewis/Winters household, possibly as research for Lamsonâs defense. A few years later, Lewis began work on The Wife of Martin Guerre.
Of the three novels, Martin Guerre remains the best known, widely admired for its power and its concision. Writers such as Evan S. Connell (who called it âone of the greatest short novelsâ3) and Larry McMurtry (âa short novel that can run with Billy Budd, The Spoils of Poynton, Seize the Day, or any otherâ4) have placed the book alongside the finest examples of the form. Over the years, the other two novels have found their champions as well. Of The Trial of Sören Qvist, Lewis scholar Fred Inglis writes, âProbably it is the most perfect of Janet Lewisâ novels, and among the most perfect of any novels.â5 Another Lewis scholar, Donald Davie, claims The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron as his favorite, lauding the book for its combination of precise language and multiple layers of plot and calling it a âconsummate performance.â6 The diversity of the three books emerges from these competing claims, even though the novels share a common focus and source of inspiration. Collected here in one volume for the first time, they represent a distinguished writer at the height of her imaginative powers.
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 âup in Michigan,â 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 (âwithout waiting to pick up her diploma,â 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, âThere was a moment, be cheerful or die. You take your choice.â)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 lifeâby all accounts, she enjoyed a remarkably happy marriageâwith 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. âI do think those women who have turned out an enormous amount of work were generally not women who had children,â she allowed in an early interview.9 But at the same time she publicly and explicitly rejected Olsenâs characterization of her, perhaps unwilling to see her family and her writing in conflict. âBeing a writer has meant nearly everything to me beyond my marriage and children,â 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 âCold Hillsâ 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. Maryâs, 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 American. To American critics, her fondness for European settings leads to comparisons as expected as Flaubert and as unusual as the Provençal writer Jean Giono. The New York Times compared her to Melville and to Stendhal. Another critic sees her, based on The Invasion and some of her short stories, as a definitive voice in Western regional writing. In some ways, Lewisâs writing remains elastic, allowing other writers to see in her a powerful reflection of their own interests. Novelists claim her novels as her best work. Poets are drawn again and again to her diverse body of poetry, which attracts new requests for reprinting in anthologies every year. In short, as with all the best writers, her work and her decades-long career defy simple categorization or comparisons.
Despite Lewisâs resistance to easy definitions, her many literary admirers, including Theodore Roethke, Wallace Stegner, and so many more, agree on two things: that her writing, particularly the poems and the historical novels, is first-class; and that she deserves a much wider readership. It is for exactly this reason that Swallow Press has created the present edition.
But if Lewis herself felt neglected as an author, there is no evidence of it. In person and in published comments, she championed graciousness. She sent thank-you notes to our publishing offices here in Ohio upon receiving her yearly royalty check. Late into her nineties, she charmed literary pilgrims who found their way to her house in Los Altos, serving them tea and apologizing for the self-described âlazinessâ that led her to sleep until the late hour of 8:30 in the morning, and for the periods of quiet introspection that meant she would sometimes go for many years without publishing new work, only to pick up again in startling new directions, be it in writing opera libretti (she wrote six, including adaptations of her own Wife of Martin Guerre and James Fenimore Cooperâs The Last of the Mohicans), or in poems quite different from the Imagist work with which she began her career.
Her disarming modesty, about her own character as well as her writing, is the most constant theme in interviews and profiles. This exchange, in the Southern Review, is characteristic:
Interviewers: Many writers and criticsâEvan Connell and Donald Davie, to name a coupleâadmire your work greatly. Yet, you are not widely known. What is your reaction to this?
Lewis: I think Iâve had as much recognition as I need and probably as much as I deserve.11
She stated that her goal in writing her Cases of Circumstantial Evidence was equally modest: to stay as close to the history as p...