ON SUNDAY MORNING Otto Fuchs was to drive us over to make the acquaintance of our new Bohemian neighbours. Jim travels in the care of farm worker Jake, and on the train with them is a family of Bohemians who get off at the same stop, and who as it happens are taking up the property next door to Jim’s grandfather’s. There she grew up among the immigrants from Europe-Swedes, Bohemians, Russians, and Germans-who were breaking the land on the Great Plains.Ĭather in the guise of Jim Burden writes: I was ten years old then I had lost both my father and mother within a year, and my Virginia relatives were sending me out to my grandparents, who lived in Nebraska. Though in the end it is only Burden’s account we hear.Įncyclopaedia Britannica says: At age 9 Cather moved with her family from Virginia to frontier Nebraska, where from age 10 she lived in the village of Red Cloud.

More than any other person we remembered, this girl seemed to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of our childhood. The story is framed in a brief Introduction where the author recounts running into Burden and the two agree to write what they remember ofĪ Bohemian girl whom we had known long ago and whom both of us admired. which is harsh, but not that far off the mark. But this one is hardly a novel at all, nor even the story of Ántonia, but rather Cather’s autobiography very lightly fictionalised as the memoir of one of her schoolmates, Jim Burden.Īs one blogger I came across wrote: “For a book about Ántonia, there was very little of Ántonia – not enough for me to build a picture of her personality.” She also wrote: Verdict: Ahem. My Ántonia (1918) is ostensibly the story of Ántonia Shimerda, the daughter of a Bohemian family come to take up newly opened farmland near (fictional) Black Hawk, Nebraska, in the same uncultivated red grass prairie country as O Pioneers!, where Cather grew up.

Clear too that while they each cover the life of one strong woman, over the same period, 1880-1910, in more or less the same small part of America’s western prairies, they barely constitute a ‘trilogy’. Well, I’ve read the three now and I’m clear The Song of the Lark is my favourite.

Willa cather 1918 novel