Willa Cather's "My Antonia" is 100 yr old

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“My Ántonia,” published five years later, returns to the prairies. Its voice is that of middle-aged Jim Burden, recalling his Nebraska youth, especially the fascinating Bohemian girl Ántonia. The ward of prosperous grandparents, Jim becomes a town boy, goes off to university and Harvard Law, achieves big-city success, marries an heiress. Ántonia slogs on the farm to help her impoverished family, works as a hired girl in town, and later, seduced and deserted, returns to the farm. Years later, Jim revisits Nebraska to renew their friendship.

Early reviewers, Cather joked, thought “My Ántonia” would interest only the Nebraska State Historical Society. With “no love affair, no courtship, no marriage, no broken heart, no struggle for success,” it lacks the usual staples. Nor did she care about plot. “I didn’t arrange or rearrange,” Jim describes his narrative. “I simply wrote down what of herself and myself and other people Ántonia’s name recalls to me. I suppose it hasn’t any form.” Cather cheerfully agreed: “If you gave me a thousand dollars for every structural fault in ‘My Ántonia’ you’d make me very rich.”

But “My Ántonia” doesn’t lack passion—“real feeling,” as Cather wrote, the “one thing you cannot fake or counterfeit.” The early chapters trace a romance—not with Ántonia, but with the prairies’ long sweep and rolling swells, vast as the sea, radiant with beauty, open and free as Eastern cities were cluttered and crowded. “The blond cornfields were red gold, the haystacks turned rosy and threw long shadows,” Jim describes autumn sunsets in a passage rich in biblical allusion. “The whole prairie was like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed….It was a sudden transfiguration, a lifting-up of day.”

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A basic irony emerges. As ambitious Jim heads east, Ántonia is a disgraced, unmarried mother drudging on the farm for a churlish brother. Two decades later, we find her well-married, matriarch of a flourishing farmstead, and mother of “ten or eleven” well-scrubbed children—pioneer Nebraska suffers no demographic crisis.

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Abandoning the prairie for Park Avenue, Jim embodies a large historical shift. Earlier, picnicking outside town one day, he and Ántonia observe across the fields a plow starkly silhouetted against the setting sun, “black against the molten red”—a dramatic image sanctifying the fruitful marriage of land and plow. But it suggests, too, the sunset of agrarian America, superseded by a new century’s noise, machinery and macadam.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/rooted-in-americas-heartland-1536954435 (paid subscription)

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I read the book almost 30 years ago, and about 10 years ago a local company staged the story. I think that I will read it again. Still have the book.