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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 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, Lewis’s 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 Lewis’s 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 “laziness” 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 Cooper’s 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 critics—Evan Connell and Donald Davie, to name a couple—admire your work greatly. Yet, you are not widely known. What is your reaction to this?

      Lewis: I think I’ve 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 possible and to let the characters and the facts speak for themselves. She demonstrated a similar sense of duty to her husband, the man who gave her the book that made these novels possible. For the thirty years that she outlived him, she kept their home in Los Altos much the way that it had been when he was alive, with his name on the mailbox and his writing shed maintained as if he might return, any moment, to use it.

      It would have been impossible to predict the success of this modest professor’s daughter, born at the very end of the nineteenth century. But her first poem in Poetry, which appeared at the height of modernism and when she was only twenty years old, seems to anticipate both her long life and the way her work stands on its own, just outside the literary canon. She writes,

      I have lived so long

      On the cold hills alone . . .

      I loved the rock

      And the lean pine trees,

      Hated the life in the turfy meadow,

      Hated the heavy, sensuous bees.

      I have lived so long

      Under the high monotony of starry skies,

      I am so cased about

      With the clean wind and the cold nights,

      People will not let me in

      To their warm gardens

      Full of bees.

      Swallow Press is honored to be the bearer of Lewis’s literary legacy, not just the three great novels but her collection of short stories and her books of poems—a lifetime of close witness to the public and the private, and a deep appreciation for the human condition.

      Kevin Haworth

      Executive Editor

      Swallow Press

      The Wife of Martin Guerre

      Swallow Press

      An imprint of Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701

      www.ohioswallow.com

      © 1941, 1967 by Janet Lewis

      Introduction © 2013 by Swallow Press / Ohio University Press

      “The Return of Janet Lewis” by Larry McMurtry, originally published in The New York Review of Books. Copyright © 1998 by Larry McMurtry, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.

      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).

      Printed in the United States of America

      Swallow Press/Ohio University Press books are

       printed on acid-free paper ƒ™

      23 22 21 20 19 18 17 13 5 4 3 2 1

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Lewis, Janet, 1899–1998.

      The wife of Martin Guerre / Janet Lewis ; introduction by Kevin Haworth ; afterword by Larry McMurtry.

      pages ; cm.

      Includes bibliographical references.

      ISBN 978-0-8040-1143-3 (pb : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-8040-4053-2 (electronic)

      1. Guerre, Bertrande de Rols, active 1539–1560—Fiction. 2. Guerre, Martin, active 1539–1560—Fiction. 3. Impostors and imposture—Fiction. 4. France—Fiction. I. Title.

      PS3523.E866W55 2013

      813'.52—dc23

      2013016158

      Foreword for the First Swallow Press Edition

      I first came upon the story of the wife of Martin Guerre in a collection called Famous Cases of Circumstantial Evidence. This volume contained, together with an essay, The Theory of Presumptive Proof, by Samuel March Phillips (1780–1862) (who in 1814 with the publication of his book Phillips on Evidence superseded Chief Baron Gilbert as an authority on the English law of evidence), many historic accounts of the failure of justice because of undue reliance on circumstantial evidence. Some of the cases presented occurred after the death of Phillips, and there is no way of knowing who recorded them, or from what sources. The trial of Martin Guerre, however, is described and discussed by the famous French jurist, Estienne Pasquier (1529–1615), in his extraordinary and encyclopedic work, Les Recherches de la France. Pasquier says: Maître Jean Corras, grand Jurisconsulte, qui fût rapporteur du procès, nous en representa l’histoire par escrit, avec

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