The Trial Of Soren Qvist

Review

“Intriguing…Janet Lewis combines scrupulous research and exquisite craftsmanship to create stories of timeless human drama…must rank among the finest historical fiction in English.”

— Tim Gioe, WDCB FM Radio, Chicago

A harmonious retelling of a seventeenth-century legend concerning a saintly pastor, his cherished daughter, and the villain who betrayed them…Miss Lewis’s artfully simple prose achieves the effect of an ancient, lovingly illuminated missal.”

— The New Yorker

“Lewis has retold a true legend of Denmark in unadorned, free, and exciting prose. Here is a gruesomely fascinating story of such circumstantial evidence as to make the reader want to cry out in protest.”

— Saturday Review of Literature

“Some of the twentieth century’s most vividly imagined and finely wrought literature.”

— The New York Times

Product Description

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. As in Lewis’s best-known novel,The Wife of Martin Guerre, the plot derives from Samuel March Phillips’s nineteenth-century study,Famous Cases of Circumstantial Evidence, in which this British legal historian considered the trial of Pastor Sören Qvist to be the most striking case.

About the Author

Janet Lewis wrote many books of poetry and historical fiction. She was married to the poet and critic Yvor Winters. Lewis died in 1998 at the age of 99.