The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis

As Melissa Homestead’s The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis details, the branding of Willa Cather (1873–1947) has been a complex process, one caught between a history fraught with homophobia and the reality of Cather’s lived experience. Homestead’s eighteen years of dogged research exposes Cather’s life and work as a lesbian in relationship with her partner, Edith Lewis (1881–1972). Correcting the image of Cather as a “sexually reticent woman” (Patricia L. Yongue, Review of Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice, by Sharon O’Brien. Great Plains Quarterly, vol. 430, 1987, p. 212, https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/430) and solitary artist who chose writing over romance, Homestead proves that Cather had both—a loving partnership and a fulfilling life as a writer whose success was bound to the contributions made by Lewis. The book reveals the importance of Lewis in Cather’s life, not as a doting subordinate, as many have presumed, but as a loving companion and a gifted writer. Homestead traces the trajectory of Lewis’s upbringing in Nebraska to her formative years as an aspiring author at Smith College, explaining why Lewis chose to pursue the financial security of magazine work over authorship. This history challenges previous notions of Lewis as someone who sacrificed her own artistic endeavors in favor of Cather’s superior talent, demonstrating, instead, that Lewis’s magazine editorial work was a creative skill that influenced and supported Cather’s development as a writer.Until now, no one has established the central role Lewis played, as editor, advisor, and critic, in the construction of Cather’s fiction. Closely interpreting handwritten edits to numerous typescripts, Homestead argues that Cather’s compressed writing style and lack of artifice was the product of “her collaboration with an advertising copywriter, who practiced her tradecraft” (181) of revising and condensing Cather’s fiction. In the hands of a less detail-oriented scholar, the material examined here could easily veer off course and into conjectures, but Homestead is steady in her convictions and in her fact-based approach. The result is an absorbing series of six chapters and an enticing epilogue that will attract some readers, like myself, well in advance of the final chapter. From the outset, Homestead situates herself in the context of her mission: to make visible and meaningful the life and work of Edith Lewis, exposing how “Cather biography and criticism made Lewis vanish” (2). Homestead asserts that Cather and Lewis were not closeted paramours but lesbians who openly lived in a committed domestic and creative partnership that was loving, industrious, and pragmatic.Homestead’s choice of “lesbian” over “queer” to categorize this relationship distinguishes The Only Wonderful Things from works such as Marilee Lindemann’s Willa Cather: Queering America (Columbia UP, 1999), which strategically employs the term “queer” to read Cather’s fiction in opposition to the pathologizing influences of heteronormativity. In Lindemann’s study, Cather is “an agent and a subject of historical processes, and her texts are interventions in such processes that outstrip and often contradict” (6) beliefs Cather may have held. Homestead does not “seek evidence of Cather’s life in her fiction” (14); rather, she illuminates how the shared routines and customs of daily life could be seen in her writing. Regardless of their different approaches, both Lindemann and Homestead pay homage to the groundbreaking work of Sharon O’Brien’s Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice (Oxford UP, 1987), an insightful and well-researched elucidation of the first half of Cather’s life and the first biography to intentionally explore Cather’s sexuality and name her lesbianism. O’Brien sees Cather’s love for women as “a source of great strength and imaginative power” but notes that Cather did not want to identify publicly as lesbian due to the very real threat of “repudiation” (6); O’Brien utilizes Cather’s college love letters to Louise Pound to reveal her lesbianism and further illustrate how Cather concealed her desires in her fiction and in her communications.On the contrary, Homestead is not interested in confining Cather to a closet of unfulfilled longings, and she finds plenty of evidence that the reader should not either. Because of the existence of only one remaining letter between Cather and Lewis, Homestead turns to the material interpretation of “a different sort of correspondence, a series of books exchanged as gifts that document not only their growing relationship but their shared commitment to aesthetic ideals” (61). Scrutinizing these literary gift exchanges allows Homestead to engage in a psychological analysis of the couple’s evolving romance, with each book summoning insight into the mind and desires of the gift giver. Particularly poignant is Homestead’s interpretation of Cather’s 1908 Christmas gift of Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Mate of Daylight and Friends Ashore (1883) to Lewis. Not only was it the first collection of stories Jewett wrote and published with Annie Adams Fields as her partner, but its subject matter exemplifies how the established roles of husband and wife are inadequate for couples who do not fit prescribed gender roles. By giving this book to Lewis, Cather communicated her appreciation of her burgeoning friendship with the like-minded Lewis. The gift also acknowledges the value of Jewett and Fields’s partnership and implies that Cather would like a similar relationship with Lewis, establishing Jewett and Fields as lesbian role models and guides for building a “deep, lasting, and intimate bond” (87) between two women who chose to be neither husband nor wife. This reading expands the influence Jewett can be seen to have had on Cather beyond literature and writing, adding nuance and texture to O’Brien’s discussion of “the psychodynamics” of Jewett and Cather’s personal bond (O’ Brien 377n1).As Homestead observes, Cather’s constant travel between Pittsburgh and New York prohibited the pair from fully establishing a life together in these early years. It was not until they moved onto Bank Street in 1913, almost two years after Cather left her position at McClure’s to write full time, that Cather “truly” (94) settled into a domestic and creative partnership with Lewis. Unlike many of their bold and extravagant Greenwich Village neighbors, Cather and Lewis fashioned a relationship that was seemingly conventional and looked much like the “Boston marriage” between Jewett and Fields, with the exception that this union, due to the cultural and political influences of the early twentieth century, was socially unsanctioned and required discretion. The vigilance with which Cather and Lewis protected their romance, Homestead insists, should neither be read as an indicator of shame nor suggest that they were hiding. They were independent and practical women who chose not to participate publicly in “the lesbian subcultures of Manhattan in the 1920s and 1930s” (226), preferring the privacy and intimacy of their shared social circles alongside their own personal freedom. By necessity, life in the metropolis was methodical and oriented around work and societal engagements. Homestead’s rendering of 5 Bank Street—the important guests, the Friday teas, the dinners shared, and the work created—energizes what could otherwise be rather dry reading. By showcasing how “Cather and Lewis’s writing pulled in opposite directions,” she brings a new, generative meaning to Cather’s “the thing not named” (172). Scholars interested in the ways in which modern materialism and consumerism influenced artistic labor will find Homestead’s analysis of the productive interplay between Lewis’s advertising career and Cather’s fiction especially valuable.The decorum of Cather and Lewis’s city life stands in stark contrast to their episodic adventures in the Southwest from 1915 to 1926. With a playwriter’s eye for ambience, costumes, and setting, Homestead captures the joie de vivre of Cather and Lewis’s explorations as tourists and explorers, acknowledging that these trips were simultaneously “romanticized fantasy” and “business ventures” (129–30). Similarly, their frequent vacations to Grand Manan, a remote Canadian island in the Bay of Fundy, where they began visiting in 1922, were a dynamic blend of work, recreation, and relaxation. Drawing on letters by Cather and Lewis, Homestead conveys their captivation with the dramatic landscape, the cool climate, and the camaraderie of the all-woman resort community of Whale Cove, where Cather and Lewis built a vacation cottage, forming lasting ties with a collective of “sister colonists” (226) who embraced them as a couple without question or judgment. Homestead’s chronicle of the founding of Whale Cove and her account of the lives of the women who vacationed there are useful for expanding our notions of the economic framework of the social relations structuring “vacation time” for unmarried white working women in the early twentieth century. In addition, the chapter on Whale Cove further establishes Lewis’s concentrated engagement with Cather’s fiction and offers an insightful perspective of the way in which Grand Manan shaped the couple’s experiences of grief.Cather and Lewis treasured their Whale Cove home and continued to travel there until 1940, when the arduous journey and rustic lifestyle became too difficult for the aging Cather. Throughout the late 1930s until Cather’s death in 1947, she faced one health crisis after the other “with little breathing room in between” (286), leaving the younger Lewis with increased responsibilities. By this point in their lives, they had been living at 570 Park Avenue since 1932 and were well established as a couple—their lives, families, and friends so intertwined that they were rarely apart. Illustrating the way in which Aunt Willa and Aunt Edith “anchored” their extended biological and chosen families, Homestead fondly acknowledges how “everyone respected their relationship without labeling it” (280). These are both happy and sad years. To some degree, Homestead’s greatest contribution is how intensely she examines the final years of Cather’s life through the eyes of Lewis. Having lost my husband to cancer three years ago, this section of the book was especially emotional for me, recalling the shock and devastation of that loss alongside the treasured memories. Cather’s death, about which Homestead has discovered several important new details, presented multiple challenges for Lewis. Homestead contextualizes these difficulties in the history of the Cold War, during which the nation sought to stigmatize homosexuals as vehemently as communists. Homestead honors Lewis’s pain with tenderness and reverence, prioritizing space within the narrative to allow the grieving Lewis to be seen fully and truthfully as the widow she was.These difficult scenes do not detract from the revelatory splendor of Only the Wonderful Things, as Homestead has managed to expose the hard truths without sacrificing the beauty and pleasure of Cather and Lewis’s shared existence. This balanced perspective alters previous images of Cather, ultimately reframing how we interpret her personal and writing life. I am already imagining how I will use this book when teaching Cather, but I am also imagining how I will implement Homestead’s analysis of Lewis’s significant contributions to Cather’s oeuvre in classroom discussions about gender, sexuality, culture, biographical criticism, and authorship. In disrupting the portrayal of Cather as a self-sufficient artist with Lewis at her feet as an indulgent assistant, Homestead has complicated the privileged position of the author by delineating how essential this imaginative partnership was to Cather’s work and legacy, opening a window into the past for future discoveries.

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