Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice [Paperback]

Sharon O'Brien (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 25, 1997

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

In the first of a two-volume biography that concludes with the 1913 publication of O Pioneers! , O'Brien pursues two aims. One is to show how Cather developed as a personality, establishing a space for herself and creating a distinctive writing voice. The other is to utilize and validate the methodologies of feminist criticism in a redefinition of the American literary canon. But though this richly documented and passionately argued work shows that O'Brien clearly has the ability to accomplish both tasks, she does not succeed entirely in integrating them. Often she uses the novelist as a cardboard exemplum of the plight of feminist creativity in a patriarchal society, sometimes causing her unique personality to dissolve into a vague "sisterhood." Still, there is more material and more illuminating reading here than in any previous Cather biography. Earl Rovit, The City College of New York
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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 )

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Product Details

• Paperback: 528 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (April 25, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674953223
• ISBN-13: 978-0674953222
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,393,144 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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