The Wife of Martin Guerre Study Guide

Janet Lewis was born in Chicago, Illinois. Her father, a college English teacher, instilled in a love of prose and poetry from an early age. Lewis first aspired to be a poet, and she was an avid member of the poetry club while attending the University of Chicago. Throughout her career, Lewis maintained the opinion that poetry is superior to prose. Lewis met many prominent members of the literary world during her college years, including the poet and literary critic Yvor Winters, who became her husband. After college, Lewis and Winters moved to California, where Lewis taught at Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley. With Winters, Lewis founded the literary magazine Gyroscope, active from 1929 to 1931. Lewis published her first collection of poetry, The Indians in the Woods in 1922, and her first novel, The Invasion: A Narrative of Events Concerning the Johnston Family of St. Mary’s, in 1932. Both works reflect Lewis’s interest in Native American culture. After a handful of other historical novels set in Europe, Lewis published The Wife of Martin Guerre, the historical French novel for which she is best known. Lewis’s poetry and prose has received acclaim from many prominent literary figures, such as Donald E. Stanford and poet Theodore Roethke. In 1998, Lewis died at 99 years old in Los Altos, California.

The Wife of Martin Guerre is based on the real sixteenth-century trial of a man who was accused of impersonating a French peasant, Martin Guerre, had been away from his family for three years. Ultimately, the court convicted the man of being an imposter by the name of Arnaud du Tilh. As well as this specific historical context, The Wife of Martin Guerre reflects the culture and tensions of sixteenth- century France. At the start of the sixteenth-century, the Renaissance comes to Paris, bringing modern styles, ideas, and values that clash with the traditional values still held by the feudal peasant villages. Furthermore, religious conflict between Protestants and Catholics across France causes many outbreaks of violence.

Lewis’s poetry collections The Indians in the Woods and The Dear Past and Other Poems, like The Wife of Martin Guerre, showcase Lewis’s lyricism and fascination with history. Also set in France, The Princess of Cleves by Madame de La Fayette tells a similar story of one woman’s tormented feelings about being toward between two men. The Romance of the Forest by Ann Radcliffe conducts a similar exploration of morality in changing society. Also a historical novel, Deborah Swift’s The Poison Keeper: an enthralling historical novel of Renaissance Italy tells the story of a girl caught between loyalties to her country and to her family.