Willa Cather was one of the 20th Century’s most popular and admired writers.  Born in Red Cloud, Nebraska in 1873 she was an independent woman, college educated, employed as a writer by McClure’s, and eventually a best selling author winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 and acclaimed for her Prairie Trilogy, “O, Pioneers” “The Song of the Lark”, and “My Antonia”.

This slim novel is probably her most ignored work.  Published after the Prairie Trilogy it got little popular attention, and Cather rarely mentioned it later in life.

The book tells the story of Myra Henshawe through the eyes of her best friend’s daughter, Nell Birdseye.  Myra Driscoll had been the talk of her town when she eloped with Oswald Henshawe in defiance of her wealthy uncle’s prohibition.  Myra went on to live a romantic and high style life in New York City returning to her hometown in southern Illinois to visit Nell’s mother and her sisters.  As Nell grows up, we see occasional views of the haughty and high-living Myra until they cross paths in an apartment-hotel in a “sprawling overgrown West-coast city which was in the throes of rapid development.”  Nell was a poor college teacher when she comes upon Oswald and Myra living in the same run down quarters.  They have fallen on very hard times.  Poverty stricken and quite ill, Myra has lost none of her panache but is in the process of dying.  Her final words to Nell, “breathed by a dying woman into the stillness of night, like a confession of the soul: “Why must I die like this, alone with my mortal enemy?”

I’m still not sure who this mortal enemy was though I lean to the explanation that it was herself and the resultant headstrong decision to elope with Oswald and forego the fortune that would have been left to her by her uncle.  Poverty versus love–an age old theme.

The book was rather slow and dull.  I loved Cather’s other books and would urge you to read “My Antonia” or “Death Comes to the Archbishop” as her finest works.