Willa Cather (1873–1947) was a US novelist whose life had some interesting similarities with the six years younger, and fellow farm girl, Miles Franklin’s, although I was unable to find any evidence that they had met, which is what I set out to do when I ended up writing this piece, filling in a wet Saturday when I might have been washing my truck and trailers.
The photo above is from “Ten things you didn’t know about Willa Cather“, Publishers Weekly, 19 April 2013. Some of the ten are:
2. Her given name was Wilella, but her family called her Willa, or more often, Willie.
4. She was raised Baptist, became Episcopalian, and was sometimes taken as Catholic.
6. Cather was first of all a successful journalist, Managing Editor of McClure’s Magazine until 1912 when she left to become a full-time writer.
7. “Cather is now widely understood as a lesbian. She lived for 38 years in domestic partnership with Edith Lewis, a professional editor, in New York City.”
8. Cather said that O Pioneers! (1913) was her second first novel, because, unlike her actual first novel, Alexander’s Bridge (1912), it was where she found her feet [Write what you know!].
9. My Ántonia (1918), was nominated for the first-ever Pulitzer Prize but missed out. She won with her next, One of Ours (1922), which I am currently reading [The Song of the Lark (1915) is still my favourite].
Her following novels were, and I’m yet to read them –
A Lost Lady (1923)
The Professor’s House (1925)
My Mortal Enemy (1926)
Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)
Shadows on the Rock (1931)
Lucy Gayheart (1935)
Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940)
I started off looking for reviews of Cather’s early work that might have come from MF. What I found was reviews of her later work. One, in the Australian Women’s Weekly ‘New Books’ page (‘conducted’ by Jean Williamson) on 14 Sep 1935 is headed “Willa Cather’s New Novel – Lucy Gayheart” and begins:
Recognised as she is as one of the finest living women novelists, a new book by Willa Cather is an event to look forward to. “Lucy Gayheart,” her latest, has just been published by Cassell. It is a work that will not disappoint Miss Cather’s many admirers.
WRITTEN in the fine manner that has been associated with this author ever since “Death Comes to the Archbishop” first brought her into prominence, “Lucy Gayheart” is … the story of a young girl who, studying and teaching music in Chicago away from her home town, meets Clement Sebastian, a famous singer, and falls in love with him….
Nowadays the conventional treatment of such a situation is to force two such lovers into a physical intimacy, then to work out their reactions from this point. Miss Cather has carefully avoided any such approach to the commonplace. Lucy and Sebastian do not progress beyond a kiss at meeting and parting, and the story is given a more exquisite poignancy because of this. This restraint is typical of the author.
Note that we are back in the Chicago, where Miles Franklin lived and worked from 1906-1915, in the opera and concert scene of which Franklin was an enthusiastic observer, and which is at the heart also of The Song of the Lark, but I can’t find when Cather was there. Jill Roe says in this connection only that Cather, like Franklin, was one of a number of authors setting novels in Chicago at this time. Franklin’s were The Net of Circumstance (1915) and On Dearborn Street (1981)
I tried MF’s diaries. Nothing on Cather, but came across this, much later, on Christina Stead’s Letty Fox (1946):
This Australian girl has gone abroad and brought her production up to international standards by writing a handbook on whores… There were plenty such as Letty’s colleagues forty years ago, but they were the exceptions not the mass, as they would seem to be by the novels of today. I knew of them through the Floyd Dell, Theo Dreiser, Cram Cook, Ben Hecht, Susan Glaspell, Maurice Browne and the Little Theatre, and the Little Review crowd. Margery Currey Dell and I became warm friends … They were urgent that I should participate in their fevers and experiments in living. They were revolting to me. I expressed what I thought to Charlotte P Gilman. She said they were ‘a thimbleful of maggots squirming in their own juice’.
I remember Floyd and Margery wrestling with me. I was invited to weekends where husbands were exchanged and virgins were ‘taught to live’. I never accepted … They tried to proselytize me through Margery, who was then accepting the doctrine of promiscuity as a part of freedom for women.
Further on in the same entry, she writes: “The loss of my singing voice was still an agonising tragedy that I never mentioned. I could have had money with a man attached several times over but death was preferable to ‘living in sin’ to one of my codes and sensitiveness.” No, I don’t see the connection between singing and sex either, but I left it in because singing and pre-WWI Chicago connect Franklin and Cather, as do their views on remaining unmarried, as well as their evident delicacy in writing about sex.
Floyd Dell, Cook and Glaspell were “midwestern”, presumabaly Chicago, playwrights; Browne was the founder of the Chicago Little Theatre; Dreiser was a novelist (and womaniser); Hecht was a Chicago journalist and screenwriter. Of Margery Dell I can find only: “It was also in Chicago that Dell adopted his bohemian life style, constructing an unconventional, “feminist” marriage with Margery Currey.” Charlotte Perkins Gilman of course, we know.
To get back to the Women’s Weekly review, it’s interesting that Death Comes to the Archbishop is the novel that brought Cather “to prominence”. The Sydney Catholic Press headed their review (of Death) ‘Great Catholic Novelist’, and when queried, responded: “Miss Cather was not a Catholic when she wrote ‘Death Comes to the Archbishop,’ but she entered the Church since that date.— Ed. ‘C.P.'” 7 Nov 1935.
It was a year before the Melbourne Advocate put this to rest with ‘Willa Cather is not a Catholic’, 22 Oct 1936.
You cannot spend a day searching on Trove without coming across a list of ‘best’ books. Under the heading “The World’s Best Novels”, a US professor proposes a list of 60 – starting with Fielding (Tom Jones), Goethe, Jane Austen (Pride & Prejudice) and Walter Scott, so not much argument there – (and including Theodore Dreiser from MF’s list of infamy above). The list is followed by criticism from the NY Herald Tribune including the line: “Some of us would wager that Willa Cather’s ‘My Antonia’ or ‘Death Comes to the Archbishop’ will be read when [Cabel’s] ‘Jurgen’ has been forgotten.” Which seems true enough. Cairns Post, 23 Sep 1930.
If I’ve whetted your appetite for Cather then I also located – and proof-corrected – in Trove a short story “The Sculptor’s Funeral”, which appeared in two parts in the Hobart Mercury of 18 Feb 1905 and 25 Feb 1905 (around 7,000 words). I was tempted to run it here, over a couple of Saturdays, as a single column in Trove is not the easiest reading, but it should be readily available, in Cather’s first collection, I think, though I can’t see it in Project Gutenberg.
see also: Miles Franklin in America