41. Edith Lewis & Willa Cather with Melissa Homestead
KIM: Hi everyone! Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit. I’m Kim Askew….
AMY: ...and I’m Amy Helmes. We’re a podcast dedicated to uncovering some of history’s forgotten women writers, and in today’s episode, we’re taking a closer look at a forgotten writer whose association with one of America’s greatest female authors has long been both misunderstood and, at times, purposefully misconstrued.
KIM: Yeah, Edith Lewis (when she is remembered at all) has often been identified as the secretary of writer Willa Cather — a label that isn’t just a simplification; it’s flat-out wrong.
AMY: Absolutely. The fact that they are buried side-by-side should tell you just how mistaken that notion is. For almost four decades, Lewis’s editorial input helped shape Cather’s writing — and for that same length of time, Willa Cather and Edith Lewis were life partners, too. Their lesbian relationship was tacitly accepted during their lifetime, only to be erased (along with Lewis’s legacy) in the second half of the 20th century.
KIM: Lewis and Cather were both aspiring writers when they met, but they each chose distinctly different career paths. Lewis’s own trajectory (first as a magazine editor and later as an advertising copywriter) is in many ways equally impressive.
AMY: Yeah, and the dichotomy between their respective careers is something that fascinates me, because I think every writer comes to this personal crossroads at some point. Edith Lewis went the pragmatic route — opting for the steady paycheck — while Willa Cather aimed for a more artistic, literary ideal. The tendency is to categorize Cather’s pursuits as the more “noble” of the two (and obviously history remembers her for that reason), but could she have accomplished what she did without that stability that Lewis’s career brought to the table?
KIM: That’s a great question, Amy, and I’m sure our guest expert today can help answer it. We can’t wait to introduce her, so let’s raid the stacks and get started!
[introductory music]
KIM: Our guest today is Dr. Melissa Homestead, a professor of English and program faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her research specializes in the history of American women writers from the Early Republic through the early 20th century, including lesser-known authors like Catherine Maria Sedgwick, Fanny Fern, and E.D.E.N. Southworth. She is the director of The Cather Project, which promotes research and teaching about the university’s famed literary alumna, Willa Cather. Homestead’s latest book, published by Oxford University Press is titled The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis. Thanks so much for joining us, Melissa! Welcome to the show!
MELISSA: Thanks! I’m glad to be here.
AMY: I know you first discovered Willa Cather when you were in high school, and your career brought you, serendipitously, to the very part of the country where Cather grew up. (You are teaching at the same school that Cather graduated from). Can you share with our listeners, though, how you happened upon Edith Lewis? Because it’s a very special anecdote that you explain in the introduction to your book.
MELISSA: Sure. Well, actually, Edith Lewis also attended the University of Nebraska for a year, but then she transferred to Smith College, which is where I went to college, and in my junior year in college, I was looking forward to writing a senior honors thesis on Willa Cather. So I was stocking up on all the books at the library book sale that had anything to do with Willa Cather, and it was the last day and they were all half price. So it was just 50 cents for hardback books -- it was great for students. And I stumbled on this book, Willa Cather Living: A Personal Record. And I didn't even look inside the book; I got back to my dorm, and it was inscribed by this author, Edith Lewis, to Mary Virginia. And I had no idea who either of them were. And I thought, you know, “What is this?” I didn't know. And it wasn't until later that I realized that Edith Lewis was Cather's partner and she had gone to Smith College like me. And Mary Virginia was Mary Virginia Auld, Willa Cather's niece. And so this all brought me to Edith Lewis through a kind of unexpected route.
AMY: As you explained, like Cather, Lewis had grown up in Nebraska. She really wanted to escape the conventional life expected of women (especially in that part of the country), which is why she eventually transferred, I guess, to Smith College on the East Coast. And I totally loved the portrait you paint in your book of Lewis’s time there. Smith College at the turn of the century was so fun to read about. Can you talk a little bit about her early aspirations to be a writer and her time there? Was her early writing any good?
MELISSA: Well, her earliest writing was actually published when she was 16 years old and still in Lincoln. And it's about as good as you'd expect a 16-year-old’s short stories would be, which is to say it's it's a little rough, but there's just an incredibly wide range, and she's clearly read a lot and she's also imagined herself living a grand bohemian life in a city somewhere, not Lincoln, Nebraska. And then she goes off to college, and she doesn't publish as much while she's in college. I think it's a little harder than getting into a weekly paper owned by your parents’ friends to get published in the Smith College monthly. But I'd say that her work during this period, it's at least as good as Cather's work that she published when she was 18 or 19 years old. And mostly, it just tells you something about her ambition, and what she wants to be. And the fact that she's out there really thinking about craft and experimenting a lot. So when Edith Lewis got to Smith, her first year, she couldn't be elected to a literary society, because you had to have a year's record to be in a literary society, but she was elected as soon as she could be, which happened to be her junior year. If she'd started out as a freshman, she would have been elected her sophomore year, probably. But she clearly had become somebody that people understood that ... they had to rate everybody on their abilities in different categories, and her literary ability category was nearly a 4.0. So she had a rep, you know? People were with her in classes where she's writing stories, and then she becomes involved as an officer. And she's one of the people who gets to select other people to get into the literary society. So she's a gatekeeper. So yes, she has quite the experience in college. And there's one professor Mary Jordan, who teaches classes that, if you just looked at the catalogue, you'd think it would be expository essays and argument. But they were kind of creative writing classes, too. And Lewis was clearly just taking these classes. Every semester, she took a class with Mary Jordan, this one professor, over and over, and you just know that she is pouring all of her effort into writing literary prose.
KIM: So after she graduated from Smith, Lewis returned to Lincoln, Nebraska, and this is when Cather and Lewis were first introduced by a mutual friend when Cather (who was 8 years older than Lewis) happened to be passing through town. Cather wasn’t “the great author” yet, right? How did they end up reconnecting and living together in New York City?
MELISSA: Well, so at this point, Cather was teaching high school in Pittsburgh, and she was placing some stories in national magazines. In fact, one of them, I think it was “The Sculptor's Funeral.” Or maybe it was “A Death in the Desert.” But one of her stories placed in a national magazine Edith Lewis had read when she was there in Lincoln, and was inspired. She really wanted to meet this person, and they had that mutual friend who edited a newspaper. So it's interesting, though, because at this point, like I said, Cather is doing okay, but she's getting frustrated with teaching high school; she thinks she should already be so much more successful as an author. In fact, at this point, she starts shaving several years off her age already, because she thinks that she isn't advanced enough in her career. And so when she meets Edith Lewis, Edith Lewis is eight years younger than her and she's like, you know, “Hell yeah! I'm going to New York! I'm just going.” And you know, Willa hasn't done that yet. She's being more cautious. So I think that she finally does get the call to New York to be an editor at McClure's magazine. And then Edith Lewis, who's working in publishing and has experience, also takes a job at McClure's, and they end up together there, but I think it's Edith Lewis who's more audacious at that moment when they meet.
AMY: And Edith was living in New York first, and so she was kind of acting like a tour guide for Willa Cather whenever Willa wanted to come visit. Edith would show her around town. So was Edith living in Greenwich Village yet or the Washington Square area yet?
MELISSA: Yeah, she’s living on Washington Square.
AMY: Clearly it inspired Cather to be like, “You know what? I’m going to take the leap and move here.”
KIM: That’s a really good point. That she, you know, she was leading her to take this step — or helping her take the steps she needed to take to become even better, I think, at her craft. So to back up our timeline just for a second, I wanted to remind viewers that Cather had written a short story which we mentioned in Episode #10 of this podcast last year. It actually sparked a feud between Cather and author Dorothy Canfield Fisher. (That feud is an interesting story, so if you haven’t listened to that episode yet, we’d encourage you to go back and check it out.) Actually, Melissa, you mention in your book that Edith Lewis was unwittingly caught up in the circumstances of that “Troll Garden” disagreement?
MELISSA: Indeed, she was! So that's before Cather moved to New York. She spent the summer of 1904 in New York with Lewis and she let Lewis read her “Troll Garden” short story collection and manuscripts. Clearly they were exchanging stories. Edith Lewis had written a story that got published the next year, and Willa Cather clearly read that story. So at the end of the year, Dorothy Canfield (so she hadn't married John Fisher yet) she and Lewis had known each other since they were kids in Lincoln, Nebraska. They played in the youth orchestra in the violin section together. And Canfield had just moved to New York in late 1904, to work at the Horace Mann School, and she asked Lewis out to dinner, so Lewis is like, “Oh, sure, let's go to dinner.” And she's telling her about these short stories that Willa Cather shared with her, and she's particularly enthusiastic about the story “The Profile,” and there's a woman with a disfiguring scar on one side of her face who never wants it to be seen when she's painted or photographed, and Canfield was like, “Whoa, Cather modeled that story on one of my friends that she met in Europe when I was there studying for grad school!” And this whole episode, of course, blew up Cather and Canfield’s friendship, but at the most basic level, it tells you how Dorothy Canfield found out about a story that wasn't published yet, because Edith Lewis had read it in manuscript and happened to share the story.
AMY: Wow. And what an awkward position for Edith Lewis to be in suddenly, sitting at the table like, “Umm, maybe I shouldn’t have said anything.”
KIM: Yeah.
AMY: But anyway, so Cather and Lewis (jumping ahead again to when they are both living together in New York City) they have the McClure’s jobs and they are roommates. They seem to be on somewhat parallel paths as aspiring writers early on in their relationship, but then a few things happen that end up spinning them off in different directions, professionally. Can you explain that a little bit?
MELISSA: Well, Edith Lewis actually seems to have stopped writing for publication by the end of 1905. Or maybe stuff that she wrote after that just didn't get placed. It's not clear. So she published two poems in national magazines in 1905. They're pretty accomplished, traditional rhymed verse. And she published an interesting short story in Collier's as the result of a prize story submission. It's kind of an odd story for a young woman to write. It's about this young man struggling to make it as an author in New York City. But I think she just knew what the judges wanted. They’re a bunch of guys -- established male authors and editors -- and so she gave them what they wanted. And they, she was paid nearly $400 for the story, which was an enormous amount of money. But then her father's business enterprises in Nebraska were just going down, down down. The family was totally a mess, because her father was just, like, losing money. This is the classic story: go to New York to try to break into the big time ... you've got parents who give you some money. No. There was no money coming from her family, it's quite clear to me. Then she and Cather are working together at McClure’s for a few years, and Cather decided she's going to become a full-time writer. But Edith Lewis, I think, you know, she's just going to be more practical. And it's not just because of Cather. (I think there's this idea that, you know, there could only be one author.) And so Edith Lewis steps aside and sacrifices her ambitions, but I also think, you know, her family stuff is just really, really sad and stressful. And I think she just knows, “Okay, I have to do something else.” And so she doubles down on it, right? And she also then, she edits Willa Cather when she submits a poem. So when Cather is about to leave McClure's (authors had to submit stuff under pseudonyms in order to not have them get an advantage) and she's about to walk out the door, and she submits a poem anonymously, and Edith Lewis actually edits it for McClure’s magazine. She's the one who writes Cather's name on it on the copy they use to set the type for the magazine. So here again, we have Cather doubling down on literary authorship and Lewis stepping away, but she sticks with magazine editing, and she's quite successful at it.
AMY: I totally identify with her here. I mean, Kim and I both were English majors, and of course, everybody wants to be the one that goes off and is writing novels. But for most of us, it's just not practical. You have to pay the rent. You have to find a job that pays. So I understand. And I found your book really interesting to trace both women's journeys as they kind of split off to do these two separate ways of being a writer. And that's not to say that what Edith was doing, that she wasn't as talented — she clearly was, and she was very well-respected as an editor.
KIM: Meanwhile the two women are living together in a flat near Washington Square. Cather early on describes Lewis as “the girl who is in partnership-housekeeping in a flat with me.” As you acknowledge in your book, there’s no documentary evidence proving that they identified as lesbians, but they lived together for 38 years. Can you maybe help put their relationship into some context for us?
MELISSA: Well, I see their relationship differently than most Cather biographers or people writing about queer history have seen it, mostly because they don't actually see Edith Lewis at all. So when Cather was in Boston on assignment for McClure's magazine in 1908, she met author Sarah Orne Jewett, and Annie Fields, who was Jewett’s partner in what was known as a “Boston marriage.” So in the 19th century, there was this social convention of accepting committed relationships between women who lived together like Jewett and Fields did. So now, most scholars say the Boston marriage declined in the late 19th century. So Jewett and Fields were kind of holdovers from that earlier time period. And then there's a moment when lesbianism is identified as a deviant sexuality and named as “lesbianism” (that's kind of like a new invention of thinking about human relationships). So Cather has been generally understood as a 20th century lesbian, right? So she's the person who realizes that she's a lesbian, understands that people think that's deviant, and then hides her sexuality. But if you pay attention to Edith Lewis and the fact that she's there with her, it looks like an entirely different person in so many ways. So for me, I think that they were in something very much like a Boston marriage well into the 20th century. And there's also the idea of a “closet” that people think is this long-standing idea about homosexuality. But the idea of the closet, that metaphor arises in the middle of the 20th century, and there are certainly people who are hiding their relationships in same sex relationships in the early 20th century, but they don't. They don't name their relationship, but they just are there. There's absolutely no hiding.
AMY: And it seemed like the people around them were totally, again, like you said, it wasn't openly discussed, but everyone was fine with their living arrangement. Everyone loved them. It wasn't a big deal. They were going on vacations together. I mean, it was pretty obvious now that you look back. I have to admit, I didn't know a lot about Willa Cather prior to this. I didn't even know that she was a lesbian. I had read her books, but it just didn't even occur to me. And I think maybe part of that also is biographers, until recently, I don't know if it was the 1980s or 1990s … nobody wanted to acknowledge this. So when was it that finally people started being like, “You know what, let’s take a look at this relationship?”
MELISSA: Well, people started saying, “Let's take a look at Cather’s sexuality,” which is not the same thing as taking a look at her relationship with Edith Lewis, right? The biographers who “out” Cather, as it were, are Phyllis Robinson in 1983, and Sharon O'Brien in 1987. But Edith Lewis is pretty much not there, in either of those books.
AMY: Oh, really?
MELISSA: Yeah, they focus on her earlier relationship with Isabelle McClung in Pittsburgh. And that's a relationship that, you know, Isabelle gets married in 1916? 1917? And I think the fact that she gets married, then Cather is “pining for a woman that she lost.”
AMY: That is so crazy! Look at the woman that is in the house! Oh my God, that's really crazy. Um, so okay, even once Willa Cather started writing novels, she had to continue to submit pieces occasionally to magazines, as well, just to pay the bills. Lewis, meanwhile, left McClure’s, and she took a job at kind of a cheap, mainstream magazine called Every Week, and she became their buyer of fiction. It seems like her editorial skills were really honed through this job, although I guess you could say it didn't have the respect maybe of a McClure's.
MELISSA: Well, if anyone wants to take a deep dive into some early 20th century popular fiction, my university's Digital Humanities Center helped me to construct a free digital archive of Every Week. So you can read short stories that Edith Lewis helped to edit. But Lewis knew her business and she knew her audience, right? She's a professional, so she wasn't editing high art. She knows that, and her correspondence, I did find her correspondence with two authors. It's hard to find magazine editors corresponding with relatively low-prestige authors, right? But I found her correspondence with Conrad Richter, who actually becomes quite famous later, and Philip Curtis. But she, even though she was being practical, and giving them practical advice and only buying stuff that her readers would want to read, she still cared a lot about craft. And so one of the executives of the company that owned the magazine, when the magazine shut down and she needed a recommendation for another job, this is what he said: He said that she had “a very fine mind, a really brilliant mind, that she was one of the best judges of fiction they had ever known,” that she had rewritten a great deal of the stuff that had come into them. So it tells you that she had a lot of experience with the craft and editing of fiction.
AMY: So we know that Lewis, at the same time, is continuing to give editorial guidance to Cather. How do you think she influenced Cather's work as an editor? Do you have any good examples of improvements she made?
MELISSA: Yeah, I was gonna say there's plenty of evidence of Edith Lewis rewriting Cather, and quite aggressively sometimes. As it happens, though, the first surviving evidence after that poem that I mentioned before is from a decade after she left Every Week. It's an edited typed draft of The Professor's House. So that was published in ’25. She was at Every Week from 1915 to 1918. And this has long been one of my favorite examples of Lewis editing Cather, and I'll just read a little thing here that gives you an idea. I mean, Cather's known for her stripped-down, clear style. But listen to some Willa Cather before Edith Lewis dug in there. So this is the beginning of the third section of the novel, and Godfrey St. Peter is thinking. “The most disappointing thing about life, St. Peter thought, was the amazing part blind chance played in it. After one had attributed as much as possible to indirect causation, there still remained so much, even in a quiet and sheltered existence like his own, that was irreducible to any logic.” So Edith Lewis picks up her pen, she crosses out that whole baggy mess, and she writes, “All the most important things in his life had been determined by chance, St. Peter thought.”
KIM: Wow. That’s huge!
MELISSA: She does other things too. On some of the edited drafts, you see them kind of going back and forth. She does an edit, Willa Cather reverses that or does something else. But I've even found some examples, though, where she does an edit, Willa Cather reverses it, then she reverses Willa Cather reversing her! So you know, they're working very hard together. And it is a big change. But on the other hand, I think what she's doing is something like what she was doing with the authors at Every Week magazine, too, which is helping Cather to live up to her own ideas of what good prose and good fiction is like. So Cather gets out there and goes “blah,” right, you know, as everybody does at some point. And then she's like, “Alright, let's get this down to what is really going to be what you would want to say.”
KIM: Yeah, exactly what you hope your editor would do for you, right? Yep.
After Every Week folded, Lewis landed a job as a copywriter for an advertising firm and she remained there for many years until her ultimate retirement. How did Willa feel about the fact that Edith worked for more “commercial” endeavors? Was she ever dismissive of her work? Or did Edith ever harbor any resentment that Willa ended up becoming the famous author while her writing was always behind-the-scenes?
MELISSA: Well, I actually think they kind of had a healthy respect for each other's work, although I think there's also some good-natured ribbing, and some inside jokes between the two of them. I mean, Lewis was already a skilled editor when she started working at the J. Walter Thompson company. But she had to be even more aggressive about space constraints when she was writing advertising copy, right, because as they say, in the advertising trade, every word costs money. So she was learning some skills that were valuable to Cather I think. Now in the 1920s, though, Cather wrote these important essays that people quote all the time about the craft of fiction. And she criticized in one of them the novel manufactured to entertain a great multitude as being like cheap soap. Well, Lewis, at that very moment, was writing advertising copy for cheap soap! But Lewis also wrote this delightful essay about the theory of advertising around the same time that Cather was complaining about cheap novels, right? So Lewis is explaining how you can kind of gin up emotion in consumers who look at advertisements, because emotion is what makes you want to buy stuff. So she's writing about soap, right? But soap was easy. Women want the social advantage of being beautiful. That's an easy sell. But then she's talking about things like soup can produce emotion. “You can write as emotionally about ham as about Christianity.” And I think she's having some fun there when she's writing that, because Cather also writes about the emotional aura that you get from fiction. So I think they're having a little dialogue that only they can hear. Cather doesn't say a whole lot directly that you can track about Lewis's advertising work. There's a few instances, but I mean, they live together. Of course, they talked about it. Can you imagine if Edith Lewis came home and didn't say anything and Cather never asked her? No! That wouldn't happen. But I think one of my favorite little examples is from the 1940s. Cather was blurbing another author's book, and she wrote to her publisher, “Miss Lewis always jeers at me when I attempt to write advertising, but this is not professional. It is simply how I feel about the book.” So Lewis was a professional. And so you can just imagine her being like, “You don't know how to write advertising.” But you know, Cather knew that she was a professional, and I think she understood that, and of course, Lewis who contributed to Cather's fiction, also respected Cather's professionalism as an author.
AMY: Didn’t Edith have some ad copy in the same actual issue as Willa had part of her novel?
MELISSA: Yeah, well, there's copy that Lewis wrote for Woodbury’s facial soap that was in McCall's magazine when Willa Cather's novelette, as they call it, (it's sort of a short novel), My Mortal Enemy appeared. And then actually, I think my favorite one is, there's a story, “Uncle Valentine,” that actually is ad-stripped with one of you Lewis's ads for Jergens lotion,
AMY: I mean, so that just goes back to the fact that, literally, they had these side-by-side writing careers. They're different, but they are just in tandem with each other in this unique way. I love it. Melissa, in one section of your book, you compare what Cather was doing in the 1920s with writing that Lewis was doing in the 1920s. And what they were each writing about was kind of at odds with one another in some respects, but then it also mirrored one another in other respects. Can you talk about that a little bit?
MELISSA: Well, sure. A lot of Cather's fiction in the 1920s is pretty cynical about heterosexual love and romance. So like, in One of Ours, the protagonist makes a really bad choice for a wife and then he runs off to war on the battlefields of France, basically, to get away from this disastrous marriage. The protagonist in A Lost Lady, she's married to a man who's much older than her who becomes disabled. She has a piece on the side, a younger man, and there's a disillusioned young man who watches this all unfold. Godfrey St. Peter in The Professor's House, he's totally disillusioned with his marriage. And this goes on. But you know, cynicism about romance doesn't sell soap and hand lotion, right? You've got to actually make consumers feel like it's going to enrich their lives. So [Lewis’s] ads are all about how these products are going to make women happy and make their lives great. You know, you're going to have a good first impression because your complexion is beautiful, and so you'll get that man. So that's the Woodbury’s facial soap ads, and then the Jergens lotions advertisements, it's like, you know, “you're married and you wash dishes and you diaper the baby and your hands get chapped. But if you put on Jergens lotion, your man can still admire your beautiful hands.” So you'll stay married, then your life will be great. So these are very different kinds of stories. But I think it's also you know, both of them also enjoyed the pleasure of describing female beauty. And they both did it in these contexts through the male gaze, right? So they're kind of subverting the male gaze, both in the advertising and the fiction.
AMY: So Lewis is kind of selling the fantasy of romance, whereas Cather, with some of her stories, at least, is tearing it down and reminding us that it's not all great!
KIM: You’re going to need more than some Jergens to keep it together! So the couple ended up building a small vacation home on Grand Manan Island in Canada in Whale Cove. And it was a sort of female-centric community. It was their favorite place to be. It looks like you can now actually rent out this cottage to stay in! Have you been, Melissa?
MELISSA: Yep, I've actually been there twice. The first time I only saw the outside of their cottage, but the second time I was on a formal research trip, and so I managed to rent the cottage, and I stayed there with my two basset hounds. So that was kind of entertaining. The scenery is just really pretty spectacular. There's these cliffs. You know where cobblestones in all of the American cities come from? They come from Grand Manan Island, because there are all these big cliffs, and the tides in the Bay of Fundy are huge. They just roll in and out, rip back and forth, and so all of these rocks just get thrown against the cliffs over and over, until they're sort of polished and round the way that cobblestones are. So they love that, and the cottage itself is charming. So going there in person really helped me to understand their place in that community. Like, I could see how far it was to go to the dining room at the end where they took a lot of their meals or how far it was to their little neighbors’ houses. And it was also just interesting to be able to imagine, you know, “Wait, wait, where did Willa Cather write? What could she see out the window?” There's all sorts of descriptions of what they see in the Whale Cove. It's called Whale Cove and whales actually would come and spout in the cove. So you just kind of imagine them. You know, I sat there on the lawn in front of their cottage and thought, “Okay, this is what they saw. What was it like for them to see all of this?”
AMY: And it really is a cottage. It's a pretty modest little house, but cozy.
MELISSA: And it was much more modest when they were there. They had no indoor plumbing, they had no electricity.
KIM: I guess they liked roughing it a little for fun.
MELISSA: I mean, they did want vigorous outdoor recreation. They liked outdoor recreation, but also when they first built there, I mean, there wasn't electricity at first, and there wasn't a telephone line until later. (They didn’t have a telephone either.) So the island was pretty remote for everybody and pretty rustic in a lot of ways for everybody.
KIM: Sounds great.
AMY: And we're not getting into it too much in this podcast, but a portion of your book also talks about some of their travels. So they were really enamored with the American southwest and you have a chapter or two devoted in your book to their travels there, which was really fun to read about. I also want to talk about the letter that Catherine wrote to Lewis that inspired the title of your book, Melissa, The Only Wonderful Things. Do you want to share a little bit about that for our listeners, how you came upon that and what that story is? It's very moving.
MELISSA: Sure. So this letter was written in 1936. I do have to say that there isn't a big body of correspondence between the two women that survived. There's just the one letter which I'll read in a minute, and five postcards. (And you don't write your deepest feelings on the back of a postcard that just goes through the mail where everybody can read it.) So that made my research challenging. But I feel like that one letter says so much about their relationship; so much about the emotional tenor of it. So I want to set the scene: Like I said, 1936 it's October, Cather and Lewis had spent a couple of months on Grand Manan that summer, but you know, Edith Lewis had to go back to work. So they go down to New York, and then Cather packs up again and goes to Jaffrey, New Hampshire where they also spend a lot of time, and Cather liked to write there and you know, autumn in New England — if you could just hang out in a lovely hotel in October in New England, you know, I sure as heck would do it. But let me read the letter: “My darling Edith,” (and other letters aren't addressed that way, I have to say.)
“My darling Edith, I am sitting in your room, looking out on the woods you know so well. So far, everything delights me. I'm ashamed of my appetite for food, and as for sleep — I had forgotten that sleeping can be an active and very strong physical pleasure. It can! It has been for all of three nights. I wake up now and then saturated with the pleasure of breathing clear mountain air (not cold, just chill air) of being up high with all the woods below me sleeping, too; in stil white moonlight. It's a grand feeling.
One hour from now, out of your window, I shall see a sight unparalleled — Jupiter and Venus both shining in the golden-rosy sky and both in the West; she not very far above the horizon, and he about mid-way between the zenith and the silvery lady planet. From 5:30 to 6:30 they are of a superb splendor — deepening in color every second, in a still-daylight-sky guiltless of other stars, the moon not up and the sun gone down behind Gap mountain; those two alone in the whole vault of heaven. It lasts for about an hour (did last night). Then the Lady, so silvery still, slips down into the clear rose colored glow to be near the departed sun, and imperial Jupiter hangs there alone. He goes down about 8:30. Surely it reminds one of Dante's “eternal wheels.” I can't but believe that all that majesty and all that beauty, those fated and unfailing appearances and exits are something more than mathematics and horrible temperatures. If they are not, then we are the only wonderful things because we can wonder.”
KIM: Oh my gosh. So beautiful!
MELISSA: Now, the little comedown is the last couple of paragraphs. She talks about the suitcases and the clothes and what they packed up. In biographies, you will see this as a letter about astronomical phenomenon and Edith Lewis packing suitcases.
AMY: Oh my gosh, that's not what it is! It makes me so sad that this is really the only letter that remains. I mean, can you imagine what some of their other letters must have been? Like if they had been saved? Oh, my gosh.
MELISSA: Well, I'm not convinced they were destroyed. They still might be out there. If anyone listening to this podcast knows where they are, please let me know. But I think it's also important to know that you don't write letters when you're together, right?
AMY: It's true. Once you're with someone, you're a domestic partner with somebody, you're not writing letters constantly. You know, I'm not writing my husband love letters every day. So...
KIM: You’re not?
AMY: I do love that letter. Oh my gosh, it’s so beautiful.
MELISSA: I do think it is a love letter.
KIM: It is. Yeah, very much. So they clearly had a long and beautiful relationship with one another. How then, did Lewis become so forgotten? Why did she vanish from the narrative of Cather’s story?
MELISSA: So Cather died in 1947, just after the end of World War II, and she left a widow, basically. And she also made her widow, Lewis, her literary executor. Now after World War II, this was the beginning of the Cold War era, and there was this rise and persecution of gay people. And so this is part of the world... you know, they started living together in Greenwich Village, in the Aughts, and here we are in the ’40s, after World War II. So I think that for some people, (not Lewis's family, not some of the members of Willa Cather's family who are all very respectful of her and feel deeply her pain at Willa Cather’s death), but some of these other people who are interested in Cather's reputation and legacy, you know, they want Cather's lesbianism, they want to cover it up. They don't want it to be visible. So what better way to make her lesbianism invisible than to make her partner of nearly 40 years invisible, or to make her risible, right? To make her look ridiculous? Or to turn her into a secretary? All of those things are ways that you just make Edith Lewis go “poof,” right? You make her vanish for what she was.
AMY: And I hate to say that I feel like Dorothy Canfield Fisher didn’t have a great part in that as well.
MELISSA: Yeah, yeah. Dorothy Canfield Fisher ... I truly think that she was responsible for a lot of the misinformation about Edith Lewis, that it really rests on her. That's the part of the story I heard first, I was just like, “Nuh-uh.” And it took me 18 years to get from hearing that to let's tell a different story than the one that Dorothy Canfield Fisher tells.
AMY: And it's further complicated by the fact that when Edith Lewis died, she was buried next to Willa Cather, but the headstone (and correct me on this) that I want to say the headstone for Edith Lewis was placed at the feet of Willa’s grave, right?
MELISSA: Well, it was a foot marker, not a headstone. And it was placed by people who actually did not know her. It's a crazy, crazy story. She didn't want a headstone. I have a whole, you know, interpretive theory about why she opted not to have a headstone — you have to read the whole book to get to the end and understand what my theory is about. But so then people started to think that she was like, you know, some sort of lap dog who got herself buried at Willa Cather's feet.
KIM: So you mentioned “18 years,” and that this biography took you 18 years to complete. What was your primary motivation in telling it? And is there anything you discovered that made you see Cather in a different light?
MELISSA: Well, just imagine if biographers writing a biography of say, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote biographies in which, you know, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, his wife, was practically invisible. I mean, that would just be ludicrous, right? That's what had happened over the years. And that's kind of the version of Cather that everybody has; the lonely isolated artist who turned her back on the world. But, you know, that's just not the life she lived. And then you put Edith Lewis back in the picture and you've got a much more engaged Willa Cather, and I think, a much more interesting Willa Cather than the one that we've been told about for so many years.
AMY: Yeah, they were having their Friday teas. I loved the idea of this salon that they had in Greenwich Village. I mean, they lived quite a life. I was thoroughly impressed by how much information you had on Edith Lewis, especially because there were no letters, like you said, but you have so much detail about her life going back through her childhood, even her parents’ lives. I was really impressed with the amount of research that you did in this book. And I'm also wondering, I hope that the Edith Lewis biography of Willa has a prominent place on your bookshelf still to this day.
MELISSA: It’s sitting right over there.
AMY: Okay. Is that biography any good?
MELISSA: It's, you know, people say all sorts of things about it. I mean, I think that the people whose judgment mattered to Edith Lewis valued the book. And I think one of the things that, for me, is the most interesting is that even though she's writing the memoir of the great author, she has opinions — she has decided opinions. And she expresses them even in that memoir. So she's not the sort of cowed person that she's presented to be. She has a definite voice. I mean, she's not much in that book, and there are very complicated reasons why it's not about her life. I mean, it's a memoir of Willa Cather. It's not her memoir, but I think there's a lot more of her there than most people give credit for.
AMY: So yeah, there’s a quote in your book from a friend of the couple’s from Whale Cove… she mentions something to the effect of “how dependent a ‘genius’ is on the unfailing devotion of someone else.” In the case of Willa Cather, it’s so clear that Edith Lewis is the unfailingly loyal someone else in question. Of course, there are lots of examples of romantic partners being either muse or editor or just “the wind beneath the wings” of a great writer, and I’ll admit that that was kind of the story I was expecting here, but I think there’s something equally interesting about following the journey that these two women from similar backgrounds took together. Their careers ran on separate, but parallel tracks, and it was really interesting to follow that learn about.
KIM: Yes, thank you so much for bringing Edith Lewis to our attention! It was wonderful to have you on the show. This has been really great.
MELISSA: I know that some people think that books written by university professors must be intimidating, but a number of non-academic readers have already told me that they've finished the book and they enjoyed reading it. And I don't think anyone will be sorry to meet Edith Lewis by reading my book, and I think you'll meet a very different Willa Cather than the one that you thought you knew.
AMY: I love reading biographies, but I like reading biographies of people that I pick up and I had never even heard of the person before. Sometimes that's almost a more magical experience because you're going in without any preconceived ideas of this person. And yeah, I felt like I really knew her by the end. And I identified with her as a writer myself. I think I'm probably more of an Edith. And that's fine.
KIM: Most of us probably are.
AMY: Yeah, and that’s okay, because she had an amazing career and life.
MELISSA: Yeah, I’m neither an Edith nor a Willa. I never had aspirations to creative writing, myself. I've published a lot of scholarly prose, but writing this book made me think of myself as a writer for the first time, because I realized that I was constructing a narrative arc and doing things that are not normally a part of scholarly prose. And I'm like, “Oh, I’m a writer!”
AMY: Absolutely. The book is wonderful. Everyone, we would really encourage you, if you have any interest in Willa Cather, especially, to check out Melissa Homestead’s book, The Only Wonderful Things. Again, Melissa, thanks so much for being here.
MELISSA: All right, thanks.
AMY: So that’s all for today’s episode -- don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter, where we’ll occasionally be giving out sneak-peek info on which books we’ll be featuring in future episodes. And please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts if you like what you’re hearing.
KIM: And as always, check out our website, Lostladiesoflit.com for a transcript of this show as well as our show notes.
AMY: Our theme song was written and recorded by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.