Jim is an orphan from Virginia who has traveled west to be raised by his grandparents. My Antonia – The Obligatory Plot SummaryĬather’s novel takes the form of a memoir written by James Quayle Burden, a childhood friend of Antonia’s four years her junior, who arrives in the Nebraska town of Black Hawk on the same day she does. And in the end, it delivered a grand thematic and emotional wallop. The novel made me wonder about its relationship to Cather’s own life. My Antonia’s episodic structure – the novel is a collage of stories – has a pleasantly proto-modernist flavor (without the tricky syntax). And there was so much motion in it the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of wine-stains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. Here is a sample from the narrator’s first impression of the prairie:Īs I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. Her descriptions of the natural world are masterful, although she does a pretty good job of making her characters and situations feel real and convincing, too. Much of my delight came from Cather’s quietly exquisite prose. So I was delighted by how good I found My Antonia.

Anything that struck readers in 1918 as innovative or shocking had long since become quaint, I believed, leaving little to command the attention of modern men and women.

Willa Cather’s My Antonia is one of those novels I saw as having faded into a genteel but deserved obscurity.

Cather my antonia