The Wife of Martin Guerre. Janet Lewis
Additional Praise for Janet Lewis and The Wife of Martin Guerre
“One of the most significant short novels in English.”
—Atlantic Monthly
“When the literary history of the second millennium is written at the end of the third, in the category of dazzling American short fiction [Janet Lewis’s] Wife of Martin Guerre will be regarded as the 20th century’s Billy Budd and Janet Lewis will be ranked with Herman Melville.” —New York Times
“Flaubertian in the elegance of its form and the gravity of its style.”
—New Yorker
“Janet Lewis brings the haunting qualities of fable to this novella, based on a legal case that attracted wide attention in 16th-century France and has continued to fascinate down through the years.”
—Ron Hansen, Wall Street Journal
“I found myself weeping. The calm detail, the observation of things that continue in nature despite our own vicissitudes, the underspoken humanity of the writing: it was a combination of these, and something magically beautiful in the choice of words besides—for Janet Lewis was a fine poet as well as novelist.”
—Vikram Seth, Sunday Telegraph (London)
“The Wife of Martin Guerre by Janet Lewis is one of the most resonant short novels I can remember.”
—Evan S. Connell, Jr., Bookforum
“One of the best short novels in English.”
—Bruce Allen, Christian Science Monitor
“Reading the three novels in a line, from The Wife of Martin Guerre to The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron, is a powerful experience. . . . In each there is a fully and vividly realized woman who finds herself twisting helplessly in the dilemmas posed by love and duty.”
—Larry McMurtry, New York Review of Books
The Wife of Martin Guerre
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, 1918–1978
Selected Poems of Janet Lewis
The Wife of
Martin Guerre
Janet Lewis
Introduction by Kevin Haworth
Afterword by Larry McMurtry
Swallow Press — Ohio University Press
Athens, Ohio
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
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Printed in the United States of America
Swallow Press/Ohio University Press books are
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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
Introduction
The Wife of Martin Guerre, Janet Lewis’s most celebrated novel, emerged from the gift of a good book from husband to wife. Sometime in the 1930s the renowned poet Yvor Winters gave his wife and fellow writer Lewis an old law book, Samuel March Phillips’s Famous Cases of Circumstantial Evidence, thinking that she might find it helpful after she mentioned that she was having trouble with one of her plots.
From that thoughtful writerly gift grew the three novels of Cases of Circumstantial Evidence, of which The Wife of Martin Guerre is by far the most famous. Already the author of one historical novel, The Invasion, Lewis was drawn to the story of Bertrande de Rols, married at age eleven to the young son of a powerful landowner. “One morning in January, 1539,” Lewis writes, “a wedding was celebrated in the village of Artigues.” From that simple opening line Lewis spins a short novel of astonishing depth and resonance, a sharply drawn historical tale that asks contemporary questions about identity and belonging, about men and women, and about an individual’s capacity to act within an inflexible system.
Lewis’s plot closely follows the string of events cited in Phillips’s 1874 legal history. Because of a dispute with his father, ambitious Martin Guerre leaves his wife Bertrande and their young son, intending to return when he can fully claim his inheritance. He finally returns, eight years later, to a woman who has grown in maturity and in her sense of belonging to the world around her. Or does he? The man who comes walking down the road looks like Martin Guerre, knows things that Martin Guerre would know. But there is something in the way he speaks to his wife, a note of kindness, in fact, that makes Bertrande wonder. Is it Martin Guerre after all?
From this question grows that most unusual of literary forms—a short novel that does its work so efficiently that it feels as substantial as a novel many pages longer. It is no surprise, then, that The Wife of Martin Guerre has drawn comparisons with the greatest short novels in American literature. “The 20th century’s Billy Budd,” the New York Times calls it.1 Larry McMurtry, no stranger to novels both short and long, writes in the New York Review of Books that Martin Guerre is a “masterpiece. . . . a short 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