Janet Lewis (1) (1899–1998)
Author of The Wife of Martin Guerre
For other authors named Janet Lewis, see the disambiguation page.
About the Author
Janet Lewis was a novelist, poet, and short-story writer whose literary career spanned almost the entire twentieth century. The New York Times has praised her novels as "some of the 20th century's most vividly imagined and finely wrought literature." Born and educated in Chicago, she lived in show more California for most of her adult life and taught at both Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley. Among her other works are The Trial of Sren Qvist (1947), The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron (1959), Good-Bye, Son and Other Stories (1946), and Poems Old and New (1982). show less
Image credit: Sélection du Reader's Digest
Works by Janet Lewis
The earth-bound, 1924-1944 1 copy
Lewis, Janet Archive 1 copy
Poems, 1924-1944 1 copy
California poetry folios 1 copy
The Invention of the flute 1 copy
The Dear Past & Other Poems 1 copy
Associated Works
Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama (1995) — Contributor, some editions — 925 copies
American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, Volume Two: E. E. Cummings to May Swenson (2000) — Contributor — 407 copies
Rediscoveries II: Important Writers Select Their Favorite Works of Neglected Fiction (1988) — Contributor — 30 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Legal name
- Lewis, Janet Loxley
- Birthdate
- 1899-08-17
- Date of death
- 1998-12-01
- Gender
- female
- Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Chicago, Illinois, USA
- Place of death
- Los Altos, California, USA
- Places of residence
- Chicago, Illinois, USA
- Education
- University of Chicago
- Occupations
- poet
novelist
professor
librettist
historical novelist
short story writer - Relationships
- Winters, Yvor (husband)
- Organizations
- American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- Awards and honors
- Shelley Memorial Award (1947/1948)
Guggenheim Fellowship (1950 - 51)
Robert Kirsch Award (1985) - Short biography
- Janet Lewis was born in Chicago, Illinois. Her father taught college-level English and she credited him with being the first to teach her the rudiments of good prose and poetic style. Her first ambition was to be a poet. She graduated from the University of Chicago, where she was a member of the Poetry Club and a literary circle that included Glenway Wescott, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, and her future husband Yvor Winters. She taught at both Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley.
Her first published collection of poems was The Indians in the Woods (1922), inspired by her childhood fascination with Native Americans. Further collections included The Wheel in Midsummer (1927), Janet and Deloss: Poems and Pictures (1990), and Poems Old and New, 1918–1978 (1981). Her debut novel, The Invasion: A Narrative of Events Concerning the Johnston Family of St. Mary’s, was published in 1932. She wrote several historical novels set in Europe, including The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941), The Trial of Soren Qvist (1947), and The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron (1959). She also wrote short fiction, collected in Good-bye, Son, and Other Stories (1946). She wrote six librettos for operas, and several song texts, some in collaboration with composer Alva Henderson.
She married Yvor Winters in 1926, and together they founded Gyroscope, a literary magazine that published from 1929 until 1931.
She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992.
Members
Reviews
The Trial of Sören Qvist by Janet Lewis
this is a book of very beautiful and clear descriptions of scene and character. The plot is rife with question of good and evil and justice,.
I've wanted to read this book since I saw the movie decades ago, so I immediately checked it out when it showed up on my library feed.
Based on an 1874 legal history, this short novel describes the events leading to a legal dispute in 1539. Martin Guerre is married to Bertrand, and after an argument with his father, with whom he owns and manages a prosperous farm, he takes off for a break. Bertrand expects him to be gone a few months at the most. Instead, he is gone eight years. When he returns, everyone accepts him as Martin Guerre, but after a while Bertrand begins to suspect otherwise--he is too "nice" to be Martin. Bertrand begins legal proceedings to have him declared an imposter.
The focus of the book was on Bertrand's state of mind. It did a good job of putting the reader into a 16th century mindset, and the characters were well-developed. Although it might seem fantastical that a woman might not recognize her husband, the story was plausible and well-told.
Recommended.
3 stars… (more)
Based on an 1874 legal history, this short novel describes the events leading to a legal dispute in 1539. Martin Guerre is married to Bertrand, and after an argument with his father, with whom he owns and manages a prosperous farm, he takes off for a break. Bertrand expects him to be gone a few months at the most. Instead, he is gone eight years. When he returns, everyone accepts him as Martin Guerre, but after a while Bertrand begins to suspect otherwise--he is too "nice" to be Martin. Bertrand begins legal proceedings to have him declared an imposter.
The focus of the book was on Bertrand's state of mind. It did a good job of putting the reader into a 16th century mindset, and the characters were well-developed. Although it might seem fantastical that a woman might not recognize her husband, the story was plausible and well-told.
Recommended.
3 stars… (more)
I read this novel years ago for school, but I was clicking around Goodreads randomly and I realised that, for some bizarre reason, this book has a lot of positive reviews, so I thought I'd try to counterbalance that a little.
This book made me really angry. For a start, it's just so boring -- you'd think it'd be easy to avoid putting too much padding in a 109-page novella, but no, this book will do such things as devote an entire page to describing a tree, and honestly, I do not care about trees that much. So. That happens.
But worse, I despised the plot. Basically what happens is this: a woman in sixteenth-century France marries this man, Martin Guerre, who is abusive and generally a despicable person. At some point he up and leaves her, which would seem to me to be the highlight of their entire marriage, except for the part where this leaves her in a precarious position in sixteenth-century France. Eight years later, Martin Guerre finally deigns to return, only now he's much kinder and warmer, a really nice guy, someone it wouldn't be hell on earth to live with. This means Bertrande (the woman) becomes convinced that he's not really Martin Guerre at all, but an impostor. Most of the rest of the book is then about her struggle to make everyone else realise he's an impostor, even though he's clearly a vast improvement on the man she was married to before, so I personally would be very inclined to bury my doubts.
Then at the end he's proved to be an impostor because the real Martin Guerre actually returns, and promptly abuses Bertrande anew to thank her for making the impostor's life as hard as possible in spite of what a great guy he was. Oh sorry, I mean for "cheating" on him. Because he was definitely entitled to her loyalty after being abusive and abandoning her, after all.
I mean, I do hate novels where characters seem anachronistic, and my teacher at the time gave me a lecture about how I just didn't understand how deep the fear of hell ran in Bertrande's time. But quite honestly, I think this depth of fear of hell would have been equally unusual in Bertrande's time as ours. In the last millennium, Europe has been full of people who had affairs or even, god forbid, sex before marriage - and this is a guy who could quite easily have been Bertrande's true husband, just a bit more mature and with an actual conscience. So fine, Bertrande is part of that small minority of people who actually think remaining loyal to an abusive husband is better than the possibility of eternal damnation. This is not really a segment of society I care to read about. Each to their own, though.… (more)
This book made me really angry. For a start, it's just so boring -- you'd think it'd be easy to avoid putting too much padding in a 109-page novella, but no, this book will do such things as devote an entire page to describing a tree, and honestly, I do not care about trees that much. So. That happens.
But worse, I despised the plot. Basically what happens is this: a woman in sixteenth-century France marries this man, Martin Guerre, who is abusive and generally a despicable person. At some point he up and leaves her, which would seem to me to be the highlight of their entire marriage, except for the part where this leaves her in a precarious position in sixteenth-century France. Eight years later, Martin Guerre finally deigns to return, only now he's much kinder and warmer, a really nice guy, someone it wouldn't be hell on earth to live with. This means Bertrande (the woman) becomes convinced that he's not really Martin Guerre at all, but an impostor. Most of the rest of the book is then about her struggle to make everyone else realise he's an impostor, even though he's clearly a vast improvement on the man she was married to before, so I personally would be very inclined to bury my doubts.
I mean, I do hate novels where characters seem anachronistic, and my teacher at the time gave me a lecture about how I just didn't understand how deep the fear of hell ran in Bertrande's time. But quite honestly, I think this depth of fear of hell would have been equally unusual in Bertrande's time as ours. In the last millennium, Europe has been full of people who had affairs or even, god forbid, sex before marriage - and this is a guy who could quite easily have been Bertrande's true husband, just a bit more mature and with an actual conscience. So fine, Bertrande is part of that small minority of people who actually think remaining loyal to an abusive husband is better than the possibility of eternal damnation. This is not really a segment of society I care to read about. Each to their own, though.… (more)
Although it's been a while since I read The Wife of Martin Guerre, I think I liked this second of Janet Lewis's fictional development of historical cases of circumstantial evidence. Set in 17th century Denmark, the story is rich with detail about place and character. Here he describes an alehouse wife come upon by a traveler, Niels Bruus, who figures largely in the unfolding of the plot. "A young woman with a good tall figure, a firm bosom and straight shoulders, came out of the inn and closed the door behind her, holding one hand still upon the latch.
With her came the aroma of the inn. It clung to the heavy serge of her garments, and she stood before the stranger in a sensuous aureole of warm air. The smell of beer, of wood smoke, of roasting meat and fish, of wool and leather impregnated with grease and sweat, all the fine compounded flavor of conviviality and food assailed the nostrils of the stranger with such a promise of good things behind the closed door that the walls of his stomach drew together painfully." (p. 13)
Later Lewis describes a spring evening:
"Anna Sorensdaughter took the long way home. There had been but a delicate warmth in this last day of April, barely enough to last over into the evening as the wind from the west rose gently and intermittently. In the grainfields there were but fine sharp spears of green, and in the beechwoods only the first unfurling of leaves. The great old oaks which stood one in each field throughout the plowed manor land were ever so faintly brushed with watery green. From amid the green transparent crowns of lindens the steep thatched roofs of farm buildings threw down their bluish shadow, lengthening toward the east, and every little granite pebble on the sandy roadway cast also its long shadow on the bright earth. THe air flowed about the girl's ankles almost as cold as the water in the small streams and touched her bare arms and her forehead pleasantly, and the contrast between the touch of the wind and the brightness of the evening sunlight delighted her." (p.65)
The interesting plot and its case of circumstantial evidence unfurl as the seasons pass and eventually lead to conclusion without resolution. Also, because a parson is involved, there is much thought given to faith and its role in human justice.
… (more)
With her came the aroma of the inn. It clung to the heavy serge of her garments, and she stood before the stranger in a sensuous aureole of warm air. The smell of beer, of wood smoke, of roasting meat and fish, of wool and leather impregnated with grease and sweat, all the fine compounded flavor of conviviality and food assailed the nostrils of the stranger with such a promise of good things behind the closed door that the walls of his stomach drew together painfully." (p. 13)
Later Lewis describes a spring evening:
"Anna Sorensdaughter took the long way home. There had been but a delicate warmth in this last day of April, barely enough to last over into the evening as the wind from the west rose gently and intermittently. In the grainfields there were but fine sharp spears of green, and in the beechwoods only the first unfurling of leaves. The great old oaks which stood one in each field throughout the plowed manor land were ever so faintly brushed with watery green. From amid the green transparent crowns of lindens the steep thatched roofs of farm buildings threw down their bluish shadow, lengthening toward the east, and every little granite pebble on the sandy roadway cast also its long shadow on the bright earth. THe air flowed about the girl's ankles almost as cold as the water in the small streams and touched her bare arms and her forehead pleasantly, and the contrast between the touch of the wind and the brightness of the evening sunlight delighted her." (p.65)
The interesting plot and its case of circumstantial evidence unfurl as the seasons pass and eventually lead to conclusion without resolution. Also, because a parson is involved, there is much thought given to faith and its role in human justice.
… (more)
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Statistics
- Works
- 23
- Also by
- 5
- Members
- 527
- Popularity
- #47,213
- Rating
- 3.9
- Reviews
- 11
- ISBNs
- 52
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