My �ntonia (Willa Cather Scholarly Edition Series) - Softcover

Cather, Willa

3.83

137,750 ratings by Goodreads

9780803263727: My �ntonia (Willa Cather Scholarly Edition Series)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0803263724 ISBN 13: 9780803263727

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 1997

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“Willa Cather called My �ntonia “the best thing I’ve done.” For Oliver Wendell Holmes, My �ntonia had “unfailing charm, perhaps not to be defined; a beautiful tenderness, a vivifying imagination that transforms but does not distort or exaggerate.” This novel secured her a place in the first rank of American writers. H. L. Mencken declared it “one of the best [novels] any American has ever done.” Cather drew deeply on her childhood days in frontier Nebraska for her fourth novel, published in 1918. Old immigrant neighbors inspired many of the characters, particularly the heroine. �ntonia Shimerda is memorable as the warm-hearted daughter of Bohemians who must adapt to a hard life on the desolate prairie. She survives and matures, a pioneer woman made radiant by spirit. The Willa Cather Scholarly Edition is faithful to Cather’s intentions for the novel as she prepared it for publication in 1918. W. T. Benda’s illustrations, omitted in many later reprintings, are included; Cather felt they were an integral part of the novel. The historical essay by James Woodress describes the origin, writing, and reception of the novel. The photographs help illuminate the fiction of a writer who drew extensively on actual experience.

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Review:

It seems almost sacrilege to infringe upon a book as soulful and rich as Willa Cather's My �ntonia by offering comment. First published in 1918, and set in Nebraska in the late 19th century, this tale of the spirited daughter of a Bohemian immigrant family planning to farm on the untamed land ("not a country at all but the material out of which countries are made") comes to us through the romantic eyes of Jim Burden. He is, at the time of their meeting, newly orphaned and arriving at his grandparents' neighboring farm on the same night her family strikes out to make good in their new country. Jim chooses the opening words of his recollections deliberately: "I first heard of �ntonia on what seemed to be an interminable journey across the great midland plain of North America," and it seems almost certain that readers of Cather's masterpiece will just as easily pinpoint the first time they heard of �ntonia and her world. It seems equally certain that they, too, will remember that moment as one of great light in an otherwise unremarkable trip through the world.

�ntonia, who, even as a grown woman somewhat downtrodden by circumstance and hard work, "had not lost the fire of life," lies at the center of almost every human condition that Cather's novel effortlessly untangles. She represents immigrant struggles with a foreign land and tongue, the restraints on women of the time (with which Cather was very much concerned), the more general desires for love, family, and companionship, and the great capacity for forbearance that marked the earliest settlers on the frontier.

As if all this humanity weren't enough, Cather paints her descriptions of the vastness of nature--the high, red grass, the road that "ran about like a wild thing," the endless wind on the plains--with strokes so vivid as to make us feel in our bones that we've just come in from a walk on that very terrain ourselves. As the story progresses, Jim goes off to the University in Lincoln to study Latin (later moving on to Harvard and eventually staying put on the East Coast in another neat encompassing of a stage in America's development) and learns Virgil's phrase "Optima dies ... prima fugit" that Cather uses as the novel's epigraph. "The best days are the first to flee"--this could be said equally of childhood and the earliest hours of this country in which the open land, much like My �ntonia, was nothing short of a rhapsody in prairie sky blue. --Melanie Rehak

From the Publisher:

"The best thing I've done is My Antonia," recalled Willa Cather. "I feel I've made a contribution to American letters with that book."

An unconventional novel of prairie life, My Antonia tells the story of a remarkable woman whose strength and passion epitomize the pioneer spirit. Antonia Shimerda returns to Black Hawk, Nebraska, to made a fresh start after eloping with a railway conductor following the tragic death of her father. Accustomed to living in a sod house and toiling alongside the men in the fields, she is unprepared for the lecherous reaction her lush sensuality provokes when she moves to the city. Despite betrayal and crushing opposition, Antonia steadfastly pursues her quest for happiness--a moving struggle that mirrors the quiet drama of the American landscape.

"No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Antonia."--H.L. Mencken

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