Much of the critical and scholarly attention to Willa Cather in the decades since her death has fallen into two categories: biographical study and stylistic or textual study. A third category, cultural and historicist study, has emerged since about 1980. We will make a brief survey of each of these three kinds of Cather scholarship, then briefly examine some of the themes that are often identified in her works and writers with whom she is often compared.

BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY

Two books about Cather that have proven lastingly useful for scholars and critics appeared soon after her death. These were a biographical tribute by her staunch admirer Mildred Bennett (The World of Willa Cather, 1951) and a memoir by her longtime companion Edith Lewis (Willa Cather Living: A Personal Record, 1953). A decade later Cather's longtime friend and correspondent Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant published Willa Cather: A Memoir (1963). The three remain sourcebooks of information and anecdote about Cather for those who continue to carry on biographically-based study of her work.

The first true scholarly biography was by E. K. Brown, a scholar-critic whom Cather personally admired, whose work she approved, and with whom she engaged in correspondence late in her life. Her letters to Brown are quite illuminating, so much so that it seems regrettable that her sudden death prevented the return visits and discussions they had planned. Brown, however, died before he could finish his book (Willa Cather: A Critical Biography, 1953). It was completed by the noted literary biographer Leon Edel. Brown can be credited, among other things, with documenting Cather's birth year as 1873, rather than 1876, as she had claimed.

The standard biographer of Willa Cather, however, is James Woodress, who actually produced, in addition to various important essays, two full biographies: a shorter volume called Willa Cather: Her Life and Art in 1970 and the massive Willa Cather: A Literary Life in 1987. The second book, in particular, where Woodress makes extensive use of Cather's letters, is a standard reference for all Cather scholars. All writers and all scholarship, however, have their limitations. Woodress was notably affiliated with the traditionalists among Cather scholars. An admirably thorough documentarist, a searcher-out of facts and evidence, he resolutely closed his eyes to questions that were, by the mid-eighties, being insistently raised by others—for example, the question of Cather's sexuality and such social/historical questions as whether or to what extent she might be called an anti-Semite. Woodress's work centers on the idea of Cather's artistry. His view of her emphasizes a self-denying devotion to her art and a dutiful devotion to family, these two being, for her, above all other things. In Woodress's pages a Willa Cather emerges whose life was so centered on her writing that she had little time or need for such ordinary human concerns as sexual expression, desire for money, or political involvement. That is, Woodress's Cather was rather unworldly. It is hard not to see his account as a rather idealized one.

In the same year as Woodress's second biography, 1987, a biography by Sharon O'Brien was published that centered exclusively on Cather's early life and her growth toward an authentic voice in fiction. O'Brien's Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice remains the single most influential presentation of the idea that Cather was probably a lesbian, at least in an emotional sense. O'Brien explains the shifting and uncertainty of Cather's early writing by the idea that she was essentially writing in disguise, in a voice that felt artificial and inauthentic. Only in O Pioneers!, O'Brien argues, with its strong and notably androgynous hero Alexandra, did Cather find an authentic way of literary production, in which her perspective and style were almost wholly shaped by the fact that she was female. Although numerous later scholars and critics have objected that O'Brien's book is over-argued or exaggerated, her work has in one way or another affected everything that has come after it.

Another biography of about that same time that has proven useful to subsequent scholarship is Hermione Lee's Willa Cather: Double Lives (1989). Although Lee's view of Cather and her experiences was somewhat limited by the fact that she was British and she found the American Midwest rather off-putting, she contributed to the study of Cather the important idea of self-conflict, which has proven well-grounded and widely influential. The idea of doubleness or inner conflict helped shape, for example, Merrill Skaggs's After the World Broke in Two: The Later Novels of Willa Cather (1990) and Janis Stout's Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World (2000). Neither of these latter books is a biography, strictly speaking, but both approach her work from a firm grounding in biographical information.

STYLISTIC, FORMAL, AND APPRECIATIVE STUDY

Cather has been greatly admired as a stylist. Much of the study of her work has been given to considerations of the formal structures or the verbal style of her work or to questions of how she can be classified—as a romanticist, a realist, a classicist, etc. Often, too, critics have examined her work for its human values, such as its celebration of home and family relationships or its hopefulness or its expression of how people of limited resources have persevered in the face of hardship to achieve lives that are meaningful both to themselves and to those around them. Criticism that explains how beautiful or how wholesome or meaningful Cather's writings are can be summed up as appreciative study. Such studies were especially prevalent in the criticism on Cather before the late 1980s, when biographically or socially questioning examination of her work came to the fore.

One of the most important of all stylistic or formal studies of Cather's fiction is David Stouck's very standard book Willa Cather's Imagination (1975). Stouck showed the affinities between various of her works and such traditional genres as the epic or the pastoral. There have also been a number of articles and chapters devoted to her techniques with respect to manipulation of narrative point of view; these, too, might be classified as formalist or stylistic in nature, although their purposes may vary a good deal. An important study demonstrating that certain features of her prose style link her to literary modernism is Jo Ann Middleton's Willa Cather's Modernism: A Study of Style and Technique (1990).

Janis Stout's chapter on Cather in Through the Window, Out the Door: Women's Narratives of Departure (1998) is formalist in that it sees a characteristic pattern of action—departure followed by retreat to a safe place—in much of her work. Probably the best and most influential of all studies that seek to establish a characteristic formal pattern in Cather's work and, on the basis of that pattern, link it to a particular literary tradition are two books published in the late 1980s and early 1990s: Susan J. Rosowski's The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather's Romanticism (1986), which links Cather to the tradition of English romanticism, and Ann Romines's The Home Plot: Women, Writing, and Domestic Ritual (1992), which groups Cather with other women writers who find meaningful patterns for their fiction in the repeated rhythms of daily home life.

Textual study of Cather's work has often meant the tracing of her reading and the literary influences that are identifiable in her novels. She was indeed extraordinarily well read, and scholars have established such ties as her awareness of classical music (Richard Giannone, Music in Willa Cather's Fiction, 1968), her emulation of certain schools of French painting (Clinton Keeler, “Narrative without Accent: Willa Cather and Puvis de Chavannes,” American Quarterly 17 [1965]: 119-26), and her agreement with vitalist philosophy (Tom Quirk, Bergson and American Culture: The Worlds of Willa Cather and Wallace Stevens, 1990). Many other studies could be mentioned here; there are a great many books and articles on Cather available.

Textual study of Cather has also meant the recovery of her texts. We see this largely in two big compendia of her journalistic writing: Bernice Slote, ed., The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cather's First Principles and Critical Statements, 1893-1896 (1966) and William M. Curtin, ed., The World and the Parish: Willa Cather's Articles and Reviews, 1893-1902 (1970). Such projects require a huge investment of time and effort. Both of these compendia include useful notes, and Slote's includes two major essays.

In recent years, textual study of Cather has moved to an entirely different level with the issuance of the authoritative Scholarly Editions, edited and published at the University of Nebraska Press and bearing the seal of approval of the Committee on Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association of America. Only a handful of volumes have been issued to date, but each provides an authoritative guide to changes made by Cather from one edition of her novels to another, explanatory notes for references in the text that might be unclear to present-day readers (such as the definition of a democrat wagon, in A Lost Lady), a summary of the critical reception of each work on publication, and other valuable information. The production of these editions is of inestimable value to serious students of her work. Each volume includes a Historical Essay and a Textual Essay as well as extensive notes on variant readings as well as on content.

CULTURAL AND HISTORICIST STUDY

Much of the scholarly criticism of literature in the late twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first has been of a kind known as cultural studies and—not identical, but related—historicist studies. Such work attempts to place literary texts or works of art in the context of the social and economic conditions within which they were produced. It also seeks to see how a literary text or a work of art reflects major currents of thought and experience in the surrounding culture—or really, to see art and literature as cultural documents.

Cather scholars were slow to adopt the methods of cultural studies and historicism, with the exception that by the late 1970s and early 1980s some critics were using the theories and arguments of feminist scholarship as a basis for their study of Cather. Sharon O'Brien was one of those. More recent examples of cultural studies and historicist approaches to Cather are Mike Fischer's article “Pastoralism and Its Discontents: Willa Cather and the Burden of Imperialism,” Mosaic 23 [1990]: 31-44, Joseph Urgo's Willa Cather and the Myth of American Migration (1995), Walter Benn Michaels's Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (1995), and Guy Reynolds's Willa Cather in Context: Progress, Race, Empire (1996). Sometimes biographical study merges with cultural study, as it does, for example, in Stout's Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World. An important short text that examines Cather quite negatively in relation to the social and cultural problems of race and the heritage of slavery is a small book by Nobel Prize winning novelist Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (1992). Morrison takes Cather to task for insensitivity in her final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl.

THEMES IN CATHER'S WORK

THE MIDWEST AND FARM LIFE

Not all of Cather's writing, of course, is about the Midwest, even though it would sometimes seem as if that were true, from some of the references that are made to her work. Many people, however, even those who are well-informed about the range of her work, think that her most characteristic novels were O Pioneers! and My Ántonia, which were set at least partly on farms in the Midwest. It is interesting to compare Cather's writing about life on the prairies to Sinclair Lewis's treatments of Midwestern town life. Perhaps the most direct comparison between the two is with the society in change depicted in A Lost Lady. Cather seems by far the more optimistic, less jaded of the two, and by far the more positive about America, at least until one notices details like the tramp who throws himself into a reaping machine in Ántonia or the parallel between Frank Shabata's shooting of his wife Marie and the shooting of female wild ducks in O Pioneers!, or the grim despair of Marian Forrester in A Lost Lady as she is left without funds and without fun in the judgmental society of Sweet Water. Sinclair Lewis himself said that Cather, rather than himself, should have won a Nobel Prize. Another writer with whom Cather is sometimes compared in reference to the novel of the Midwest is Hamlin Garland. Once again, however, Garland's stories in Main-Travelled Roads (1891) are much more obviously grim than Cather's, which in general become grim only after one has looked past the rather sunny surface. (Her story “A Wagner Matinée” is an exception that might well be compared to Garland's stories.)

It is worth noting that Cather is beginning to be looked at in relation to the Western, a genre that has usually considered emphatically masculine. Susan J. Rosowski's Birthing a Nation: Gender, Creativity, and the West in American Literature (1999) studies Cather alongside such other women writers who deal with America's West as Jean Stafford and Marilynne Robinson.

ESCAPE, AND THE AMERICAN IN EUROPE

A frequent theme in the novel of growing-up or in the novel of Midwestern life is the escape wish, the desire to get away to a more independent or more exciting or beautiful life. Cather's story “Paul's Case” has often been read in those terms, but in fact, as she herself indicated in correspondence with her friend Dorothy Canfield Fisher, the impulse of escape runs throughout her work, in partnership with an equally strong wish to find or return to a secure home. The escape wish is especially clear in One of Ours.

As the story of Claude Wheeler in Cather's so-called war novel, One of Ours, demonstrates, she often sees an American's escape wish as being a wish to go to Europe and to live there a life imagined as being more sophisticated, artistic, and beautiful or mature in its style than life in the rawer society of America, especially America's West. The yearning for Europe or a depiction of an American's experience in Europe is especially strong in Alexander's Bridge, One of Ours, and The Professor's House, but is important in The Song of the Lark and, by inference, in My Ántonia as well, and also in some of Cather's essays, short stories, journalism, and poetry. In her attention to the theme of the American in Europe or the American's yearning for Europe, Cather demonstrated a strong link with other writers of her time, such as Henry James, Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and others.

WOMEN'S LIVES

Cather is consistently recognized for having written fiction that deals seriously with women's lives. Usually, it is women's domestic lives as mothers and as creators of order and nurturance in the home that are thought of as her fictional milieu, largely on the strength of My Ántonia. But in fact she also wrote about women's urge to find themselves through professions or careers, often careers as artists. She wrote a number of short stories about opera singers, as well as her novel about the development of a singer's career, The Song of the Lark, and the thwarted development of a pianist's career, Lucy Gayheart. Her less-read short novel My Mortal Enemy is importantly concerned with a woman's frustration in the constraints of a domestic and social role, a younger woman's efforts to find herself as a journalist, and, in the background, the career development of a woman actress (the actual Helena Modjeska, whom Cather met and interviewed during her newspaperwoman years). Even in My Ántonia there is a counter-current of interest in freedom to pursue non-traditional and/or non-domestic lives for women.

There are, of course, a great number of women writers with whom Cather has been compared in this respect. One of the most important of these, though not often recognized until recent years, is Mary Austin, who also wrote books about the West and Southwest and a book about an aspiring woman performer, A Woman of Genius (1912). Cather is sometimes mentioned in connection with the very successful novelist Edith Wharton, partly because of overlap of time, though she claimed not to welcome such comparisons. A recent book by Deborah Williams, Not in Sisterhood (2001), studies the parallels and interactions among Cather, Wharton, and another quite successful writer of the time who is little known today, Zona Gale. Parallels and, in fact, borrowings have been seen with Ellen Glasgow and with Katherine Anne Porter. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar explore a number of parallels with other women modernists in Sexchanges, Volume 2 of No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (1989). Comparisons with Sarah Orne Jewett (for example, in Ann Romines's The Home Plot) are very persuasive, since Jewett was an important, though brief, mentor for Cather. Romines also draws comparisons with Eudora Welty. Links have also been made with the current novelist Anne Tyler and with others. She has also been compared—though not frequently—with Virginia Woolf, not only for her interest in women's lives and the subtlety with which she explores them, but for her emphasis on an art of ineffable implication rather than direct statement.

THE WAR NOVEL

It is interesting to discuss Cather's work in relation to the war novel, which was such a major genre in the twentieth century. Of course, the war novel (like the Western) is usually regarded as a men's genre. But in fact a number of women have written about war, and especially about World War I, both in memoir and in poetry. Since Cather's One of Ours was so severely criticized by men such as Ernest Hemingway, Edmund Wilson, and H. L. Mencken, it is interesting to place her novel alongside Hemingway's and those of other novelists of war such as John Dos Passos. Is Cather more romanticizing and idealizing than they are? In fact, does her novel truly romanticize the war, or is it only her young hero, Claude, who romanticizes it? We can also compare One of Ours to the World War I writings of Edith Wharton and of Cather's friend Dorothy Canfield Fisher, who assisted her with the revisions of the novel.

THE SOUTHWEST

Cather first became enamored of the arid Southwest when she read about it as a child. In 1912 she traveled to New Mexico and Arizona and spent several months in the area with her brother. She would make a number of return trips in later years, during one of which she happened upon W. J. Howlett's Life of Bishop Machebeuf (1908). These experiences entered into at least three of her novels—The Song of the Lark, The Professor's House, and Death Comes for the Archbishop. There is a great deal of information about fiction and art dealing with the Southwest, and it is interesting to discover that Cather's period of excitement about the region coincided with a general surge of interest in the Southwest after the First World War. In fact, there are theories of why that interest arose, having to do with Americans' feeling of recoil from identification from Europe, where ancient hostilities had contributed to such a horrifying event as the terrible war.

Writers with whom it is useful to compare Cather with respect to her interest in the Southwest include Mary Austin, Oliver La Farge (whose novel Laughing Boy Cather liked a great deal), and Adolf Bandelier (like La Farge, an anthropologist who did professional work in the Southwest and also wrote fiction set there). Mary Austin is a writer who was essentially rediscovered in the 1990s, but was well known in the early decades of the century. As interest in her works has increased in recent years, scholars have discovered that she and Cather were personally acquainted, and direct connections have been established between Austin and some of Cather's works. We might also consider parallels between Cather and the popular travel writer Charles Lummis, who coined the phrase “See America first,” and between Cather and a number of women anthropologists who worked in the Southwest at about the same time, such as Elsie Clews Parsons. Her work has sometimes been compared to the southwestern art of photographer Laura Gilpin and painter Georgia O'Keeffe, both of whom emphasize a female presence and a certain starkness or minimalist view.

CLASSICISM

A major influence on Cather's sensibility and on her writing was her study of the Classics—that is, the standard writings of Roman authors in Latin and the Greek poets, dramatists, and philosophers (whom Cather knew less well than the Romans, because of her mastery of Latin). A considerable amount of very useful criticism has been done on the Classical nature of her standards of judgment and her own writing, most notably books by David Stouck and by Susan J. Rosowski.

Cather read some Latin and Greek during her youth in Red Cloud and while she was a student at the University of Nebraska. The traces of Virgil, the great epic poet in Latin and also the writer of the celebrated Eclogues (stylized pastorals) and Georgics (more humanly realistic poems praising the virtues of agricultural life and work), are particularly evident in her works, in their formal affinities and motifs as well as in direct allusions.

A Virgilian epigraph from Book Three of the Georgics adorns the title page of My Ántonia: Optima dies … prima fugit, meaning, the best day is the first to flee or, by implication, the earliest part of life is the most precious. Jim Burden reads that line as a college student in the “Lena Lingard” book of My Ántonia and goes on to ponder another line from the Georgics, Primus ego in patriam mecum … deducam Musas, I will be the first to bring the Muses into my homeland. It is very much a statement of Cather's sense of herself in relation to the Nebraska Divide (the area in Webster County lying between the Republican River and the Little Blue River, where her Nebraska novels are set). Virgil's Aeneid, an epic of the founding of Rome by migration from the defeated city of Troy, is paralleled in the motif of heroic migration and occupation in My Ántonia and The Professor's House, especially. Also, many of her poems in April Twilights (including some that appeared in the original volume but were dropped from subsequent editions) have Classical settings, references, and personages.

This survey of the study of Willa Cather demonstrates that interest in her work has not waned since her death. In fact, it has seen a resurgence after a few years when she was not often read seriously by scholars. Her readership among general readers and in high school classrooms remained strong all along, and she is now considered a major figure in the canon of American literature both by scholars and by readers at all levels.