‘During that burning day when we were crossing Iowa, our talk kept returning to a central figure, a Bohemian girl whom we had both known long ago. More than any other person we remembered, this girl seemed to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of our childhood …His mind was full of her that day. He made me see her again, feel her presence, revived all my old affection for her.’
Set in the pioneering period of European settlement on the tall-grass prairie of the American mid-west, with its beautiful but terrifying landscape, rich ethnic mix of immigrants and native-born Americans, and its communities who share life’s sorrows and joys, this is the unforgettable story of an immigrant woman’s life seen through the eyes of her childhood friend, Jim Burden.
Together, Antonia and Jim share childhoods spent in a new world. Jim leaves the prairie for college and a career in the east, while Antonia devotes herself to her large family and productive farm. Her story is that of the land itself, a moving portrait of endurance and strength.
Described on publication as ‘one of the best [novels] that any American has ever done’, My Antonia paradoxically took Cather out of the rank of provincial novelists as the same time that it celebrated the provinces, and mythologized a period of American history that had to be lost before its value could be understood.
By Willa Cather
Warren Book Club 