Some writers purposely look for anonymity. J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon are the poster boys for this type of avoidance of the limelight and the trappings of fame. Other writers toil in obscurity until they are “discovered” late in their careers. Then there are some like Herman Melville who rose to spectacular fame and adulation early only to gradually lose almost his entire readership over the rest of his life, die almost completely forgotten and then get metaphorically resurrected as perhaps the man who actually did write the Great American Novel.
And then there are cases like Everest Lewin. Lewin never attained the heights of popularity that these previously mentioned writers enjoyed, but was well respected enough to regularly land poems in highly esteemed anthologies and school textbooks. Public information on Lewin is sketchy at best, although with proper credentials and a little bit of digging, one can gain access to three of “Effie’s” diaries through the British National Archives.
When conducting research into the back of Lewin, it is helpful to know it may benefit the process of expanding the search terms to include her married name, Mrs. E.H.G. Macdonald. Also on hand at the British Archives is a letter from an “Aunt Harriet” to Lewin offering congratulations to her on her recent engagement to Tom MacDonald. That letter is dated is May, 1904. Thirty-five years later the author of a collection titled Post-Victorian Poetry, Herbert Palmer, would assert observe that her output had been slender, but nevertheless had resulted in what in his “opinion is the most exciting and moving sonnet of this century.”
The great mystery of that singularly talented poet remains wrapped in mystery answered by little else available than one very hard-to-find collection of poetry and those selections of that collection which have been over the years chosen for inclusion in those various anthologies. As Ralph Newman Spaulding noted in his paper “Poetry and Tasmanian Institutions of Learning: 1840-1950,” Everest Lewin is today lumped into the company of William Canton, Susan Dantree, and Phyllis Harnoll…poets that “have long been forgotten.”
