The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, edited by Andrew Jewell – review

Willa Cather is an American novelist without name-recognition in Europe, yet she had a wider range of subject and deeper penetration of character than other compatriot novelist of her century. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Bellow and Roth vie with, but never beat, her emotional force and the beauty of her prose. The great obstacle is that she is a woman, with a name that sounds silly. She knew more about survival in extreme conditions than other novelists, she wrote in 1913, ‘but I could never make anybody believe it, because I wear skirts and don’t shave’.

As a young woman, Cather feasted on Virgil and Shakespeare — and it shows. In O Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918) she celebrated heroic young women struggling for fulfilment, and proving their powers of leadership, on brutal, impoverished homesteads in 19th-century Nebraska. The Song of the Lark (1915) depicts the fierce, ruthless concentration required by artistic ambition.