“Against a Darkening Sky has the quality of a moving tone poem, with the conflict expressed through the exploration of a woman’s heart and mind. The writing has the same high quality of serenity as the splendid woman it portrays.”
The New York Times
“Almost half a century before the silicon chip, Janet Lewis had written about ecological disaster, ‘the incoherent civilization emerging from the physical wilderness.’ (Against a Darkening Sky is the) story of the violent accidents and unhappy love affairs which pound the quiet life of a house-wife living in a Santa Clara orchard.”
Richard Stern, Virginia Quarterly Review
Against a Darkening Sky was originally published in 1943. Set in a semirural community south of San Francisco, it is the story of an American mother of the mid-1930s and the sustaining influence she brings, through her own profound strength and faith, to the lives of her four growing children.
Scottish by birth, but long a resident of America, Mary Perrault is married to a Swiss-French gardener. Their life in South Encina, though anything but lavish, is gay, serene, and friendly. As their children mature and the world outside, less peaceful and secure than the Perrault home, begins to threaten the equilibrium of their tranquil lives, Mrs. Perrault becomes increasingly aware of a moral wilderness rising from the physical wilderness which her generation has barely conquered.
Her struggle to influence, while not invading the lives of her children, is the focus of this novel of family life during the Depression years.
Janet Lewis was a novelist, poet, and short-story writer whose literary career spanned almost the entire twentieth century. The New York Times has praised her novels as “some of the 20th century’s most vividly imagined and finely wrought literature.” Born and educated in Chicago, she lived in California for most of her adult life and taught at both Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley. Her works include The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941), The Trial of Sören Qvist (1947), The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron (1959), Good-Bye, Son and Other Stories (1946), and Poems Old and New (1982). More info →
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978-0-8040-0866-2
Retail price: $18.95,
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Release date: October 1985
312 pages
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5½ × 8 in.
Rights: World
Electronic
978-0-8040-4128-7
Release date: August 2023
312 pages
Rights: World
Good-bye, Son and Other Stories
By Janet Lewis
Lewis’ only collection of short fiction was first published in 1946, but remains as quietly haunting today as it was then. Set in small communities of the upper Midwest and northern California in the ’30s and ’40s, these midcentury gems focus on the quiet cycles connecting youth and age, despair and hope, life and death.
Literary Fiction · Short Stories (single author) · American Literature · Women Authors · Literature
The Wife of Martin Guerre
By Janet Lewis
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Introduction by Kevin Haworth
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Afterword by Larry McMurtry
The Wife of Martin Guerre—based on a notorious trial in sixteenth-century France—is “one of the most significant short novels in English” (Atlantic Monthly). Originally published in 1941, it still raises questions about identity, belonging, and about an individual’s capacity to act within an inflexible system.
Literary Fiction · Historical Fiction · Women Authors · American Literature · France · Literature
The Trial of Sören Qvist
By Janet Lewis
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Introduction by Kevin Haworth
Originally published in 1947, The Trial of Sören Qvist has been praised by a number of critics for its intriguing plot and Janet Lewis’s powerful writing. And in the introduction to this new edition, Swallow Press executive editor and author Kevin Haworth calls attention to the contemporary feeling of the story—despite its having been written more than fifty years ago and set several hundred years in the past.
Literary Fiction · Historical Fiction · Women Authors · American Literature · Literature
The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron
By Janet Lewis
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Introduction by Kevin Haworth
This historical novel is the third and final book in American poet and fiction writer Janet Lewis’s Cases of Circumstantial Evidence series, based on legal case studies compiled in the nineteenth century. In The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron, Lewis returns to her beloved France, the setting of The Wife of Martin Guerre, her best-known novel and the first in the series.
Literary Fiction · Historical Fiction · Women Authors · American Literature · France
