Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice - Softcover

O'Brien, Sharon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0674953223 ISBN 13: 9780674953222

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1997

Synopsis

This is the first biography of Willa Cather to explore thoroughly the connections between her artistic and her psychological growth. O'Brien makes full use of biographical and literary materials: Cather's personal and professional correspondence, photographs, and the early short stories as well as the major fiction. Dealing openly and seriously with Cather's lesbianism, the book explores the importance of female friendships in Cather's life and work and assesses the impact that her need to conceal her sexual identity had on the creative process. Concentrating on Cather's childhood, adolescence, young womanhood, and lengthy apprenticeship, O'Brien paints the portrait of the artist as a young woman and reveals the complex interplay between Willa Cather's life and her work. In a new Preface, O'Brien sets the book in its historical context.

About this title

About the Author:

Sharon O'Brien is John Hope Caldwell Professor of American Cultures at Dickinson College and editor of the Library of America edition of the works of Willa Cather.

Review:

A landmark achievement. For the first time a Cather biography follows in detail the transformation of the girl, talented and wildly unsuited to the assigned female destiny, into a functioning, autonomous adult...Scholarly, open-minded, tireless, [O'Brien] explores all the avenues her own investigations and other theorists have opened for her, and thus provides a model for female biography...Without anger or defensiveness [O'Brien] has...written a woman artist's life, seldom if ever re-created so imaginatively and, therefore, so accurately. (Carolyn Heilbrun New York Times Book Review)

What distinguishes this biography from earlier ones by D. Daiches and E.K. Brown is its incomparably larger scope and its feminist perspective...The biography has all the strengths of feminist criticism at its best. With the impressive psychological insight of the same-sex biographer and with a daunting wealth of detail, O'Brien evokes the experience of Cather, a girl...in an environment so restrictive to an ambitious female that her only option is to denounce her gender, cross-dress, and change her name to William...The Willa Cather who emerges from O'Brien's biography is not the familiar character of a writer who happened to be female, but the less known one of a woman writer who had to assert her right to be herself every part of the way...An absorbing story of a fascinating literary personality. (Joanna Durczak European Association of American Studies)

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0674953223
• ISBN 13: 9780674953222
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 528