Willa, the Life of Willa Cather

by Phyllis C. Robinson

Book Overview

Biography, Women's Studies, Literary Studies This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 038515254X
• ISBN13: 9780385152549
• Release Date: January 1983
• Publisher: Doubleday Books
• Length: 321 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Solid, informative, but not terribly exciting

If you are looking for a very solid and informative biography of Willa Cather, you could do much worse than this book. It is not terribly long, but in its just under 300 pages of text (excluding notes and index) Ms. Robinson manages to cover in decent detail all the main events of Willa Cather's life. One of the reasons that it is possible to do this in such a short span is that Cather did not lead a terribly eventful life. Mainly what she did was write. She did not engage in a string of lurid love affairs, and did not do a great deal to register headlines. She had a couple of affairs with women, but they were quiet and nonostentatious. The second she lived with for forty years of her life. I am a huge lover of Willa Cather's books, but for me the disappointment is that in this biography Cather did not emerge as someone who I especially would have liked to know. She doesn't appear to have been an especially great hearted person, and for someone who was a lesbian, she had disappointingly conservative political opinions in most other ways. She had little interest in issues concerning women as a whole. She doesn't seem to have been sensitive to race issues. In a sense, she seems to have been personally an isolationist in the same sense that the US as a whole was during most of her lifetime. One of the points the biography makes is how terribly private Willa Cather was. She almost never gave interviews, and it is very hard even after reading this biography to get much of a sense of her as a person. To be honest, unless someone has an uncontrollable compulsion to know more about Cather, I believe I would recommend instead just rereading one of her books. There are very few writers of whom I believe I would make that statement.