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Introduction
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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 author’s long and notable career. From the French countryside of The Wife of Martin Guerre, the most famous of Lewis’s 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 XIV’s 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. Lewis’s 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 world—a 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 Lewis’s 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. “You know what happens and to whom it happens,” Lewis explains in an interview with the Southern Review, speaking of the plots of her books and their basis in actual events. “But why it happens, you don’t know until you can get inside these people.”1 1 Roger Hofheins and Dan Tooker, “A Conversation with Janet Lewis,” Southern Review 10, no. 4 (1974): 331. x Kevin Haworth The characters and the respective legal entanglements of the three novels collected here are inspired most directly by Samuel March Phillips’s 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 Lamson ’s defense through both public advocacy and consultations with Lamson’s 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 Lamson’s 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 “one of the greatest short novels”3 ) and Larry McMurtry (“a short novel that can run with Billy Budd, The Spoils of Poynton, Seize the Day, or any other”4 ) 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, “Probably it is the most perfect of Janet Lewis’ novels, and among the most perfect of any 2 For more on the Lamson case and its relationship to Janet Lewis and Yvor Winters, see Bernard Butcher, “Was It Murder?” Stanford Magazine , January/February 2000. 3 Evan S. Connell, “Genius Unobserved,” Atlantic 224, no. 6 (1969): 152. 4 Larry McMurtry, “The Return of Janet Lewis,” New York Review of Books 45, no. 10 (1998): 21. [44.204.218.79] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 09:58 GMT) xi i n t r o d u c t i o n novels.”5 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 “consummate performance.”6 The diversity of the three books emerges from...