The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis by Melissa J. Homestead

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis by Melissa J. Homestead Jada Ach Melissa J. Homestead, The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis. New York: Oxford UP, 2021. 394 pp. Hardcover, $39.95; e-book, $14.39. After spending eighteen years researching the life of Edith Lewis, Melissa J. Homestead learned “to see what should have been obvious all along”: “Lewis’s instrumental presence at [Willa] Cather’s side rather than at her feet” (2). Organized both thematically and chronologically, The Only Wonderful Things depicts Lewis and Cather not only as “life partners” but also as “literary collaborators” (2). Homestead depends on extensive and illuminating archival research to render visible Lewis’s artistic, editorial, financial, and emotional contributions to her “creative partnership” with Cather, a term the author borrows from Lillian Faderman’s To Believe in Women (8–9). Such an intimate and generative partnership, Homestead claims, challenges us to rethink Cather’s oeuvre through a collaborative lens. According to Homestead, who serves as director of The Cather Project and associate editor of The Complete Letters of Willa Cather, critics and biographers have often characterized Lewis—when they characterize her at all—as a kind of assistant to Cather. Even more frequently, scholars tend to depict Lewis as “a nonentity or a mystery, or they draw thumbnail sketches of a fussy, slightly hysterical woman,” Homestead adds (8). As a corrective project, The Only Wonderful Things sets out to define Lewis as a successful writer, editor, and “modern career woman” in her own right (3). When it comes to Cather’s writing life, Lewis’s support and influence were paramount, Homestead asserts throughout. In one of the most provocative chapters, “‘Our Wonderful Adventures in the Southwest’: Willa Cather and Edith Lewis’s Southwestern Collaborations,” Homestead argues that Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, The Professor’s House, and other western regional works should largely be viewed as “collaborative texts” (115), which challenges the image many have in their minds of Cather as a “solitary genius” (13). In fact, Lewis’s “handwriting appears all over a working typed draft” of The Professor’s House, leading Homestead to refer to Lewis as a kind of coauthor. In the case [End Page 438] of this and other works by Cather, it is frequently “Lewis’s language that readers have known for nearly a century as characteristic of Cather’s style,” Homestead says (139). Later in her life Lewis even confessed to her nurse that she wrote an entire chapter of Cather’s Shadows on the Rock. This radical reframing of literary authorship does more than just demonstrate the amazing potential of creative collaboration; through close examinations of manuscripts, letters, sketches, photographs, and other materials in the vast Cather archive, Homestead argues that Lewis achieves the creative agency that many critics have either overlooked or denied altogether. In addition to helping to write, edit, and revise Cather’s work, Lewis’s financial stability as a magazine editor and advertising copyeditor gave her partner the ability to take creative risks and dedicate herself to her craft. “As a pilot and anchor, Lewis made Cather’s New York-centered life possible,” Homestead argues in the second chapter, highlighting the fact that Lewis’s position as assistant editor of Every Week gave the two women yet another opportunity to actively engage their “creative partnership.” Every Week frequently published western genre fiction, Homestead tells us, and it is probable that these stories informed the development of one of Cather’s most celebrated novels, My Ántonia. “Lewis’s magazine editorial work and Cather’s novel writing were not parallel activities running on separate tracks,” the author claims. “Instead, the two Nebraskans were thinking together about their home region and how to present it to a national audience through both words and pictures” (106). Every project that depends on the archive must grapple with the gaps that exist in the archive. Near the end of the book, Homestead admits that her “account of Cather and Lewis’s life together would be richer” had she access to more letters between the two women; currently, only one letter...