My Ántonia

About this edition

Introduction

My Ántonia is a novel about a woman written by a man who spends the whole book explaining that he cannot have her, and it is one of the few books in which that framing is the point rather than the problem. Jim Burden, successful lawyer, unhappily married, remembers the Nebraska of his childhood; Ántonia Shimerda, the immigrant girl he grew up beside, is what he remembers. She is the subject of the book and never its narrator, which has annoyed some readers and fascinated others for a century. Cather knew exactly what she was doing: she was writing about the person who does the remembering, too.

The novel’s method is deliberately plain. There is no plot in the ordinary sense — no secret, no crime, no inheritance — and Cather said as much at the time, describing the book as something closer to a memoir than a novel. What holds it together is place and time: the prairie in the 1880s, the immigrant families who broke it, the town that grew beside it, and the way a childhood landscape stays the measure of everything afterwards. The five books move from the raw homestead to the settled town to the city and back, and the last of them is a return that most novels would not risk.

It is also a book about work — farm work, household work, the work of women who were hired out to other people’s kitchens — written without condescension and without sentimentality. Cather’s immigrants are not picturesque. They are cold, hungry, superstitious, quarrelsome, generous, and occasionally destroyed; Mr Shimerda’s suicide in the first winter is the event that the rest of the book quietly organises itself around. The famous praise of Ántonia as a source of life is earned, because the book has shown us the cost of the life in question.

Cather’s prose is the other reason the novel survives. She had a theory that a novel should be written without “furniture” — without the accumulated description that nineteenth-century fiction used to prove it had done its research — and My Ántonia is the practice of that theory. Whole years pass in a sentence. A death is given three lines. What is left is the thing itself, and it has proved remarkably durable.

This edition gives the complete text, unaltered, in forty-five chapters across five books. The notes gloss the prairie economy and the immigration history that the novel assumes — homesteads, dugouts, hired girls, the town — and the reading guide is for anyone who wants to argue with the book rather than simply be moved by it.

The author

Willa Cather was born on 7 December 1873 in Virginia and died in New York on 24 April 1947. Her family moved to Nebraska when she was nine, to a farm among neighbours who were mostly immigrants from Bohemia, Sweden, Norway and Russia — the world of this novel, which she knew at first hand rather than researched.

She studied at the University of Nebraska, worked as a journalist and a teacher, and spent five years as an editor at McClure’s Magazine in New York, a job that made her one of the most influential magazine editors in the country and left her exhausted. In 1912 she left it to write. O Pioneers! appeared in 1913 and My Ántonia in 1918; both draw on the Nebraska material, and both were written against the prevailing fashion for the crowded, documentary social novel.

She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with One of Ours in 1922, and went on to write A Lost Lady (1923), The Professor’s House (1925) and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), among others. She deliberately reduced her output toward the end of her life, destroyed much of her correspondence, and left instructions against the publication of her letters — a decision that has made her biography harder and her reputation more controlled than most twentieth-century writers’. Her standing has only risen: she is now generally read as one of the two or three best American novelists of her generation.

Publication history

My Ántonia was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1918, after serialisation in The Saturday Evening Post in 1918 — the magazine’s readers met the book in instalments, and the novel’s shape was adjusted for them. It followed O Pioneers! by five years and consolidated Cather’s position; it did not, however, make her rich, and she supported herself for years partly on magazine work.

The reception was respectful and slightly puzzled. Reviewers admired the landscape and the immigrant characters and were uncertain what to do with a novel so lacking in incident; the standard complaint was that it was a collection of sketches rather than a book. That complaint has not entirely disappeared, and the novel’s defenders now tend to treat the same quality as its achievement.

Cather revised her texts in later editions, but this novel has come down to us essentially in its 1918 form. The text reproduced here follows that text as transcribed for Standard Ebooks, and not a word of it has been changed.

Notes

A short glossary of the prairie economy and the immigrant history the novel assumes. Almost none of it is explained in the text, because Cather’s first readers lived inside it.

• Bohemia — the historical Czech lands, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Shimerdas are Bohemian; the novel’s other families are Swedish, Norwegian and Russian, and the differences between them matter socially.
• Homestead — land granted under the Homestead Act of 1862 to anyone who would live on it and cultivate it for five years. It is how the immigrant families in the novel acquire land, and it is brutally hard: the first years produce nothing.
• Dugout — a dwelling dug into the ground or a hillside, roofed with sod, and the commonest first home on the prairie. The Shimerdas’ dugout is not poverty by their own standards; it is how everyone starts.
• Black Hawk — the novel’s fictional town, based on Red Cloud, Nebraska, where Cather grew up. It is where the farmers’ daughters go to work as hired girls, and where the novel’s social machinery is most visible.
• Hired girl — a young woman from a farm family who works in a town household for wages. The phrase marks a class position: respectable, but employed, and treated as slightly dangerous by the town’s own daughters.
• Prairie — the grassland the novel is set in, and an economic fact before it is a landscape: it has to be broken with a plough, it holds no timber, and its weather can remove a year’s work in an afternoon.
• Frame narrative — the device by which an unnamed woman, a friend of Jim’s, meets him on a train and is given the manuscript. It is Cather’s way of distancing the story from herself, and of telling us the story is a written document rather than a recollection.
• Lincoln — the Nebraska university town Jim goes to, and the first place where the novel’s characters begin to separate by education and income rather than by weather.
• “The Pioneer Woman’s Story” — the title of the novel’s fourth book, and the phrase that has become shorthand for what the book is about: the woman who stayed, married, bore children and made a farm, while the man who remembers her went away.
• Americanisation — the process by which immigrant families were expected to become English-speaking and culturally invisible. The novel is quietly sceptical about it, and Ántonia’s refusal to be fully assimilated is part of what makes her heroic.

Reading guide

Six questions for a first or a fifth reading. None of them has a settled answer.

1. Ántonia is the title and never the narrator. What does the book gain — and what does it lose — by seeing her only through Jim?
2. Cather said the book was more memoir than novel, and early reviewers complained it had no plot. Is that a fault, a method, or an argument about what a novel can be about?
3. The prairie is beautiful in this book and it also kills people. How does Cather hold those two things together without either sentimentalising or moralising?
4. Jim leaves and Ántonia stays, and the novel treats both as legitimate. Does it really believe that, or is the ending a consolation offered to Jim?
5. The hired girls are the novel’s most vital characters and the town’s most scandalous. What is Cather saying about respectability — and about who gets to define it?
6. The last book is a return after twenty years, with children in it. Why does the novel risk a happy ending after everything it has shown us?