“Edith and I Hope to Get Away to Grand Manan”

Abstract

This chapter reconstructs Cather and Lewis’s two decades of vacationing as part of an all-woman resort community of Whale Cove on Grand Manan Island in the Bay of Fundy. There, Cather and Lewis enjoyed outdoor recreation and the company of like-minded women, and they also worked intensively on the writing and editing of Cather’s fiction. They built their own cottage in the late 1920s, just as both women’s parents were declining and then died, making Grand Manan an important site for mourning and recovery as well. In the early 1930s, they invited women in their families to be their guests there. Finally, however, travel to the remote island became unsustainable, and they never returned after 1940.