![]() When she was nine years old, her family immigrated to Nebraska, to a territory ‘as bare as a piece of sheet iron’. She was born in 1873, into secure well-ordered Virginian society. More recently, feminist criticism has grappled her to its manly chest. Later her sentimental patriotism made her deeply unfashionable. ![]() She won a Pulitzer prize, and became required reading for American students. Willa Cather took on this task in a manner unique among the female writers of her time. Survivors have the task of turning their memories into myths. When the pioneering is done, when infinite space proves finite and you have fenced it in, what do you do with your pioneering virtues? You tell stories about them, put them into verse. The romantic notion has it that it is the conquest of the wilderness that formed the American character – open, robust, democratic and optimistic. ![]() The women came behind with the pack animals. Thus wrote Walt Whitman, 1865, on how the West was won. Plain I see you Western youths, see you tramping with the foremost, So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship, ![]()
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