Volume 47, Number 19 · November 30, 2000
Justice for Willa Cather
By A.S. Byatt
Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism
by Joan Acocella
University of Nebraska Press, 127 pp., $20.00
The United States has produced many great women poets, beginning with Emily Dickinson, whose extraordinary example may be responsible for their inventiveness and freedom. It has not produced great women novelists in the same way. The only two I am sure about are Willa Cather and Toni Morrison. Edith Wharton seems to be at the very front of the second rank. Harriet Beecher Stowe was a great force, and had genius, but her art was clumped and intermittent. Cather, like Dickinson, forged a style, an art, and a subject matter out of precise observation, wide reading, and idiosyncratic certainty. Like Dickinson, she had a perfect ear, and made new rhythms for American-English prose. Unlike Dickinson, she has had neither a wide influence nor a place in histories of American literature commensurate to her power.
Review, 4145 words
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