Word: cather
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...Willa Gather a "minor writer" [Aug. 13]? Unequivocally this places the reviewer, Martha Duffy, in the category of "lost lady": she has befuddled her thinking with today's hollow tomes. Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop has been one of America's most enduring classics...
Spirit of Freedom. A Lost Lady is typical of the kind of prairie pastoral Cather did best. Through the eyes of a boy named Neil Herbert, it tells of the Forresters, a couple whose fortunes are tied to the railroads. Their house outside Sweetwater-one of the many fictional names Cather gave to her own town of Red Cloud-is known "from Omaha to Denver for its hospitality and for a certain charm of atmosphere." Neil is enchanted by young Marian Forrester. She wears the only earrings he has ever seen, allows herself a little wit and more than...
...aging and broke. That should probably be the end of the tale, but a coda finds Marian dying comfortably in Buenos Aires as the wife of a rich Englishman. It is a disastrous touch, the kind of thing that makes it hard, in the end, to take Cather seriously. Almost all her books drag on beyond their natural terminus, sometimes with two or three more stops. There is always some sentimental beneficence still to be dispensed, or worse, a moral toll to be exacted...
Though her best characters are women, Cather was wary of her sex. In The Professor's House, the melancholic hero-obviously speaking for the author-decides that Euripides spent his last years in a cave "because he had observed women closely all his life." Cather was also a prude. We are not told Marian Forrester drinks a little but merely get "the sharp odor of spirits." In My Antonia, the local lecher is obliquely indicated by the comment that he set a former housemaid up "in the business for which he had trained...
...Cather stuck by all these cosseting convictions. In an essay on fiction, she dismisses much of what has given the novel its vitality: any detail about commerce, labor, manufacturing, cooking, clothing and above all, "physical sensations." To her an artist's "power of observation was but a low part of his equipment." She unfortunately limited her own work by filtering priceless powers of observation through a kind of rigid moral nostalgia...