Nebraska, New England, New York

This chapter describes Edith Lewis’s family history, childhood, and education as a background to her first meeting with Willa Cather in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1903. Because of Lewis’s deeply rooted New England family history, her Nebraska childhood, her elite eastern college education, and her plans to move to New York to pursue literary work, Cather found powerfully concentrated in Lewis two geographically located versions of the past she valued: the Nebraska of her own childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, and a New England–centered literary culture she encountered through reading. Cather also glimpsed in Lewis the future to which she herself aspired, the glittering promise of literary New York.

Introduction

Using Cather and Lewis’s shared gravesite in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, as a touchstone, the introduction describes how biographers have approached the question of Willa Cather’s sexuality, how critics have applied queer theory to readings of her work, and how Lewis’s place in Cather’s life and creative process has been repeatedly ignored or misrepresented. The introduction lays out the terms on which this volume defines Lewis’s relationship with Cather and makes her visible again: it introduces Lewis’s role as Cather’s editor and suggests how models of the history of sexuality have failed to capture the persistence of the so-called Boston marriage into the twentieth century.

“Edith and I Hope to Get Away to Grand Manan”

This chapter reconstructs Cather and Lewis’s two decades of vacationing as part of an all-woman resort community of Whale Cove on Grand Manan Island in the Bay of Fundy. There, Cather and Lewis enjoyed outdoor recreation and the company of like-minded women, and they also worked intensively on the writing and editing of Cather’s fiction. They built their own cottage in the late 1920s, just as both women’s parents were declining and then died, making Grand Manan an important site for mourning and recovery as well. In the early 1930s, they invited women in their families to be their guests there. Finally, however, travel to the remote island became unsustainable, and they never returned after 1940.

Epilogue

This epilogue turns back to the years immediately following Cather’s death to reveal how Edith Lewis was transformed from Cather’s domestic partner and trusted literary collaborator into a ridiculous specter. It focuses on, E. K. Brown, whom Lewis had commissioned to write a biography of Cather, and Willa Cather’s old friend Dorothy Canfield Fisher as they observed Lewis—or, more to the point, often failed to see her for what she was. When Brown died before completing the biography, a crisis briefly ensued. The epilogue argues that the mythology about Edith Lewis and her near vanishing from Cather biography emerged at this moment of crisis, which coincided with the Cold War panic over homosexuality. It closes with an analysis of Cather and Lewis’s New Hampshire gravesite.

“We Are the Only Wonderful Things”

After losing their Greenwich Village apartment in 1927, Cather and Lewis had no permanent home in New York City, living together instead at the Grosvenor Hotel when both were in the city. In 1932, they finally leased an apartment on Park Avenue. The first half of this chapter reconstructs their life together in the 1930s and 1940s living on Park Avenue and traveling to Europe and Mt. Desert Island in Maine. The chapter includes their responses to the Great Depression and World War II, the formation of new friendships and maintenance of old ones, the deeper intertwining of their families, and Cather’s declining health. After describing Cather’s death and burial, the second half of the chapter tells the story of Edith Lewis’s mourning for Cather in the years immediately after Cather’s death and her work as Cather’s literary executor.

“The Thing Not Named”

In 1919, Edith Lewis began her long career as an advertising copywriter at the J. Walter Thompson Co. This chapter considers the advertising campaigns for Woodbury’s Facial Soap and Jergens Lotion, for which Lewis was the sole copywriter in the 1920s, in relation to Willa Cather’s fiction and aesthetic theories. Lewis’s embrace of advertising as a career and Cather’s rejection of modern consumerism seem to register a conflict within their relationship. However, it could also be productive, even playful, as the two women engaged in an implicit dialogue about the pleasures and perils of modern materialism and the desires it could engender. The chapter also considers how Lewis shaped Cather’s approach to celebrity, focusing on Edward Steichen’s Vanity Fair portrait of Cather in 1927 and contrasting Cather’s approach to celebrity and advertising with that of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

“Our Wonderful Adventures in the Southwest”

Willa Cather and Edith Lewis traveled together to the American Southwest in 1915, 1916, 1925, and 1926, and southwestern travel became their shared passion, an escape from the pressures of modern city life into a realm of adventure. In the Southwest, Cather also sought experiences and information necessary for her creative work, and she transformed experiences she shared with Lewis into fiction. They informed Cather’s novels The Professor’s House and Death Comes for the Archbishop. This chapter describes their experiences as tourists and as women playing at being western cowboys. The chapter also gives full treatment to Lewis’s role as Cather’s editorial collaborator, using The Professor’s House as an example.

Office Bohemia

Edith Lewis moved to Greenwich Village in 1903 to pursue literary work and Bohemian life. Willa Cather visited her there twice before moving to the Village herself in 1906 to become an editor at McClure’s Magazine, the staff of which Lewis also joined. This chapter argues that Lewis’s editorial collaboration with Cather emerged out of their work at McClure’s. It also argues that when they moved in together in 1908, they followed the example of Sarah Orne Jewett and Annie Fields, whom Cather had met while working for McClure’s in Boston. Cather left magazine work to take up full-time authorship, but Lewis continued working at McClure’s and then Every Week. Lewis gave up writing bylined fiction and poetry, but together she and Cather merged pragmatism and idealism, the market and aesthetics.