Wuthering Expectations: It is only the truth for you, not for us - Janet Lewis's The Wife of Martin Guerre

Wuthering Expectations: It is only the truth for you, not for us - Janet Lewis's The Wife of Martin Guerre
Excerpt:
Another short novel today, Janet Lewis’s The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941).  Lewis’s historical novel is written on entirely different principles than Saramago or Sebald use.  The story is based on a famous 16th century court case, and Lewis constrains herself with the details contained in the legal record.  The fictiveness of the novel exists between the legal facts, within the head, really, of Bertrande de Rols, the wife...
Update: I forgot to link to D. G. Myers's enthusiastic review of The Wife of Martin Guerre...
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Excerpt:
 A commonplace of modern literary thought is that “the tragic mode is not available,” Lionel Trilling says, “even to the gravest and noblest of our writers.” Perhaps it is not surprising that Lewis, the wife of the reactionary critic Yvor Winters, would have ignored the commonplaces of modern literary thought. But her novel goes further. Published at the end of Auden’s “low dishonest decade,” it has the effect of calling into question the literary values of the age—the self-important difficulty, the grandiose incoherence, the rage at all costs to be New, even if that ends in the pursuit of evil. The Wife of Martin Guerre commits none of these. It is an austere and renunciatory work. It has no clever and yackety “voice.” It is written in a plain, expository style—a style of...