Memoirous

Very few writers can write strong female characters. Of course Willa Cather gave us Ántonia and Alexandra from O! Pioneers . From reading The Selected Letters of Willa Cather (edited by Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout) you get a sense of how much she loved and appreciated women, especially the girls she surrounded herself with growing up. Willa Cather and Edith Lewis shared an address, first at 5 Bank street (1913 – 1927) and then at 570 Park Ave. in New York City. Edith Lewis was a gifted editor. Surely their’s was a partnership. Many have tried to suss out the exact nature of their relationship. A tomboy growing up and at times a cross-dresser in high school and university, Cather is thought to have been a lesbian. The editors of Cather’s letters looked at the two women’s correspondence. “There aren’t, you know, explicit kind of descriptions of the nature of their relationship in here,” Jewell said. “Instead, what you get is Edith Lewis’ perpetual presence in Cather’s life in m...

In a recent post I wrote about My Ántonia , an early century—last one—novel by Willa Cather about life on the Nebraska plains—before they became the Nebraska wheatfields and then the Nebraska cornfields. A major theme of this blog is memoir or to be specific memoir-ish. My Ántonia pulled heavily from Cather’s own memories of growing up in Nebraska. Like Jim Burden she immigrated from Virginia to Nebraska and grew up on her grandparent’s farm before moving into town, Red Cloud (Black Hawk in the book). There are many parallels between Cather’s own life that in fact the novel reads like a reminiscence. A sort of sentimentality settles on the characters as if rendered through the telescope of memory.   Since getting a Kindle last fall I’ve been experimenting with getting eBooks from the library. Amazon doesn’t make it easy but after a list of steps determined to take me back to Amazon and leave a digital footprint I’ve successfully downloaded a number of books. One rec...