In her novel Cool for You the lesbian poet Eileen Myles writes about reading a book to her friend, who is dying of AIDS:

I went looking to try to figure out which book this is. So far I’ve read two short stories (The Queen’s Twin and Martha’s Lady, both of which are excellent, the latter of which made me cry) and now Deephaven. There is a whole lesbian history surrounding Jewett and her work and I’m not educated or interesting enough to go on about it here. I’ll say this: I might read Jewett’s entire bibliography and not know for sure which novel Myles meant.

Deephaven is, structurally, not much more than a collection of conversations and experiences that our leads, Nelly and Kate, have while summering in the eponymous fishing town. However, the entire novel is connected by thin and shining filaments of solidarity between women so that taken together it is an iridescent lattice, like a visualization of hopelessly complex data. There are countless moments where Jewett writes tenderly about grief, interiority, domestic violence, dignity, memory, ageing, and other subjects that occur within and between the women in her novel. Her touch is so light that she is able to represent daunting and intricate experiences with a few simple phrases, or even by leaving certain things unwritten. I will not tame sexuality by saying it is not present here; the reality of it between Kate and Nelly is so quiet and at ease with itself that it is represented in the days and years they anticipate alone with each other, in the lessons they learn and the stories they hear together, and in the small and storied rooms of the house in Deephaven, rather than in direct depictions of passion. In every subject Jewett’s approach is phenomenological.

As one point of pain and regret, it’s shocking how visibly the impact of christianity on Jewett’s philosophy reduced her ability to experience the world. There are a few instances in the novel where Kate and Nelly think about what sort of life it would be without god or heaven. At one point, they specifically meditate on mortality though their “sudden consciousness… was not fear” because of their expectation of an afterlife. I wonder how much richer Kate and Nelly’s experience of Deephaven, and Jewett’s almost unbearably loving description of relationality, solidarity, and loss, would have been if the author had come to terms with fear and death. I would say that she does lightly grapple with it in the chapter “In Shadow,” but only lightly. I think of Eileen Myles years later, how her work deals heavily with existentialism, and how much sharper her insight is for lack of a great dampening and deadening force like christianity hindering her thoughts.

I know nothing about Jewett, and little about her times. Even the imposition of christianity on Deephaven feels of secondary importance compared to everything else she seemed capable of doing. Like any author writing for a culture that was swift and violent in its condemnation I wonder how much of the reference to religion is lip service so that she could get away with her primary, blasphemous goal: stories about intimacy between women.

I want to close with this famous passage from a letter that Jewett wrote to Willa Cather in 1908, following the publication of Cather’s story The Gull’s Road: