“Reading Virgil in college, the narrator of “My Ántonia” is struck by the lines “for I shall be the first, if I live, to bring the Muse into my country.” For the Roman poet, “my country” was rural Lombardy; for Cather, transplanted to New York, it was the prairies, cottonwoods, bleak winters, cornfields and homesteaders of 1880s Nebraska. Her first novel, set in patrician Boston and Savoy-Hotel London, she acknowledged a mistake. Turning to “the people and the country that are my own,” she made a second, truer beginning with “O Pioneers!”
“My Ántonia,” five years later, returns to the prairies. Its voice is that of middle-aged Jim Burden, recalling his Nebraska youth, especially the fascinating Bohemian girl Ántonia. The ward of prosperous grandparents, Jim becomes a town boy, goes off to university and Harvard Law, achieves big-city success, marries an heiress. Ántonia slogs on the farm to help her impoverished family, works as a hired girl in town, and later, seduced and deserted, returns to the farm. Years later, Jim revisits Nebraska to renew their friendship.”
- Robert Garnett
Masterpiece Column
client: The Wall Street Journal