Review of Willa Cather’s “My Ántonia”
Reading the Classics Updated
Reading the Classics Updated Lists
Reading the Classics
When I retired a few years ago, I embarked on a goal of reading as many of the great classics as I could, including writing reviews of the books as I read them.
One thing to bear in mind when reading the classics is that many of the classics to a modern reader appear ablest, colonist, racist, sexist, and all the other isms that some modern readers might find objectionable, including freely use the N word and other pejorative words. The key is to acknowledge that fact, and then read and enjoy the novel on its own terms in its own time and place and not get too hung up on dealing with the racism etc that may be found in the book.
Fortunately, “My Antonio” does not contact much sexism, racism or other issue to distract the jaded modern reader.
This is my review of the classic novel, “My Ántonia” published in 1918 by the American woman author, Willa Cather. This novel is considered Cather’s first masterpiece. Cather was praised for bringing the American West to life and making it personally interesting. The novel is part of Cather’s “Prairie Trilogy,” which includes “O Pioneers!” and “The Song of the Lark.”
The novel takes place in the late 19th century in Nebraska and details the life of immigrants in the settlement of Nebraska. The protagonist is an orphan, Jim Burden, who is sent to live with his grandparents who are pioneer farmers. Jim befriends Ántonia, a local Bohemian immigrant and her family who settled next door. Ántonia is a free-spirited woman who runs the farm for her mother and brother after their father commits suicide. Life in the Nebraskan frontier was difficult. Ántonia eventually moves into the nearby town and works for a local family. She eventually has a child out of wedlock, then marries another Bohemian immigrant and has eventually ten children.
. Throughout it all, she keeps up her free spirit and emerges as a strong, determined woman. Jim finishes high school, goes to Harvard, and becomes a lawyer. Twenty years later, he returns to Nebraska and befriends Ántonia and her family again.
The highlight of the novel for me is the characters and their relationships with each other, and the hardships that they all faced together in the settlement of Nebraska. The main characters are all immigrants, some from Germany, some from Hungary, some from Norway and Sweden, and others who are from back east, like Jim and his grandparents.
The action takes place on Jim’s grandparents’ farm, in the nearby settlements, and in the nearby town where the grandparents move after finding managing a farm too difficult for them. There is even a murder, and assorted scandals in the small Nebraskan settlements.
Co-Pilot provided the following bio and list of Willa Cather’s works:
Biography of Willa Cather
Willa Cather (1873-1947) was an American writer known for her novels about frontier life on the Great Plains. Born in Virginia, she moved to Nebraska with her family when she was ten years old. She attended the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and later worked as a journalist before turning to full-time writing. Cather’s works often explore themes of the American frontier and the immigrant experience. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1922 for her novel “One of Ours.”
List of Willa Cather’s Works
- “O Pioneers!” (1913) part of Prairie trilogy
- “The Song of the Lark” (1915) part of Prairie trilogy
- “My Ántonia” (1918) part of Prairie trilogy
- “One of Ours” (1922) – Pulitzer Prize winner
- “A Lost Lady” (1923)
- “The Professor’s House” (1925)
- “Death Comes for the Archbishop” (1927)
- “Shadows on the Rock” (1931)
- “Lucy Gayheart” (1935)
- “Sapphira and the Slave Girl” (1940)
- “The Prairie” (1941)
Quotes from “My Ántonia”
“Some memories are realities and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.”
“If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry.”
“I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”
“The country girls were considered a menace to the social order. Their beauty shone out too boldly against a conventional background.”
“The sky was growing pale, and that forgotten plow had sunk back to its own littleness somewhere in the prairie.”
“Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.”
“She’d always believe him. That’s Ántonia’s failing, you know; if she once likes people, she won’t hear anything against them.”
“The idea of you is part of my mind … you really are a part of me.”
“I was convinced that man’s strongest antagonist is the cold.”
“This is reality, whether you like it or not — all those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath. This is the truth.”
“Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.”
“That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”
“There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.”
“The prayers of all good people are good.”
“As I went back alone over that familiar road, I could almost believe that a boy and girl ran along beside me, as our shadows used to do, laughing and whispering to each other in the grass.”
“This was enough for Ántonia. She liked me better from that time on, and she never took a supercilious air with me again. I had killed a big snake – I was now a big fellow.”
“More than any other person we remembered, this girl seemed to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of our childhood.”
End Quotes
I have been reading books from the collection titled “50 Books You Must Read Before You Die” which consists of three volumes. I finished all of Volume Three first and am working my way through Volume One and Two. Hope to finish it all by the end of the year.
I am currently reading “The Awakening” by Kate Chopin and will write a review when I am finished with it.
Here’s the list of the books I am reading, with the ones I completed in bold:.
Here’s the list of the books I am reading, bolded are the ones I completed
Harvard Classics
(1) Franklin, Woolman, Penn
(2) Plato, Epictetus,
Marcus, Aurelius Meditations
(3) Bacon,
Milton’s Prose,
Thomas Browne
(4) Complete Poems in English: Milton
(5) Essays and English Traits: Emerson (
6) Poems and Songs: Burns (7)
Confessions of St. Augustine. Imitation of Christ
(8) Nine Greek Dramas (9)
Letters and Treatises of Cicero
Pliny
(10) Wealth of Nations: Adam Smith
(11) Origin of Species: Darwin
(12) Plutarch’s Lives (13)
Aeneid Virgil (14)
Don Quixote Part 1: Cervantes
(15) Pilgrim’s Progress. Donne
Herbert. Bunyan, Walton
(16) The Thousand and One Night
(17) Folk-Lore and Fable. Aesop, Grimm,
Andersen
Hans Christian Anderson’s Fairy Tales
(18) Modern English Drama
(19) Faust,
Egmont Etc.
Doctor Faustus,
Goethe,
Marlowe
(20) The Divine Comedy: Dante
(21) I Promessi
Sposi,
Manzoni
(22) The Odyssey: Homer
(23) Two Years Before Mast. Dana
(24) On the Sublime French Revolution Etc. Burke
(25) Autobiography Etc. Essays and Addresses: J.S. Mill,
- Carlyle
(26) Continental Drama
(27) English Essays: Sidney to Macaulay
(28) Essays. English and American
(29) Voyage of the Beagle: Darwin (
30) Faraday,
Helmholtz,
Kelvin,
Newcomb,
Geikie
(31) Autobiography: Benvenuto, Cellini
(32) Literary and Philosophical Essays:
Montaigne,
Sainte Beuve,
Renan,
Lessing,
Schiller,
Kant,
Mazzini
(33) Voyages and Travels
(34) Descartes,
Voltaire,
Rousseau,
Hobbes
(35) Chronicle and Romance:
Froissart,
Malory,
Holinshed (36)
Machiavelli, the Prince
More,
Luther
(37) Locke,
Berkeley,
Hume
(38) Harvey,
Jenner,
Lister,
Pasteur
(39) Famous Prefaces
(40) English Poetry 1: Chaucer to Gray
(41) English Poetry 2: Collins to Fitzgerald
(42) English Poetry 3: Tennyson to Whitman
(43) American Historical Documents
Federalist Papers
Constitution
Bill of Rights
Declaration of Indepedence
(44) Sacred Writings 1
(45) Sacred Writings 2
The Bible
The Quaran
The Analects of Confucius
Mencius
Buddist Writing
Bhaga Vita
Lao Tzo The Tao
(46) Elizabethan Drama 1
(47) Elizabethan Drama 2
(48) Thoughts and Minor Works: Pascal
(49) Epic and Saga (
50) Introduction, Readers Guide,
50 Books to Read Before You Die
Vol 1 starts with Volume One
Alcott, Louisa May: Little Women
Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice
Austen, Jane: Emma
Balzac, Honoré de: Father Goriot
Barbusse, Henri: The Inferno
Brontë, Anne: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Brontë, Charlotte: Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily: Wuthering Heights
Burroughs, Edgar Rice: Tarzan of the Apes
Butler, Samuel: The Way of All Flesh
Carroll, Lewis: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Cather, Willa: My Ántonia
Cervantes, Miguel de: Don Quixote
Chopin, Kate: The Awakening
Cleland, John: Fanny Hill
Collins, Wilkie: The Moonstone
Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness
Conrad, Joseph: Nostromo
Cooper, James Fenimore: The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen: The Red Badge of Courage
Cummings, E. E.: The Enormous Room
Defoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe
Defoe, Daniel: Moll Flanders
Dickens, Charles: Bleak House
Dickens, Charles: Great Expectations
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor: Crime and Punishment
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor: The Idiot
Doyle, Arthur Conan: The Hound of the Baskervilles
Dreiser, Theodore: Sister Carrie
Dumas, Alexandre: The Three Musketeers
Dumas, Alexandre: The Count of Monte Cristo
Eliot, George: Middlemarch
Fielding, Henry: Tom Jones
Flaubert, Gustave: Madame Bovary
Flaubert, Gustave: Sentimental Education
Ford, Ford Madox: The Good Soldier
Forster, E. M.: A Room With a View
Forster, E. M.: Howard End
Gaskell, Elizabeth: North and South
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: The Sorrows of Young Werther
Gogol, Nikolai: Dead Souls
Gorky, Maxim: The Mother
Haggard, H. Rider: King Solomon’s Mines
Hardy, Thomas: Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel: The Scarlet Letter
Homer: The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor: The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hugo, Victor: Les Misérables
Huxley, Aldous: Crome Yellow
James, Henry: The Portrait of a Lady
Volume 2
– Little Women [Louisa May Alcott]
– Sense and Sensibility [Jane Austen]
– Peter Pan (Peter and Wendy) [J.M. Barrie]
– Cabin Fever [ B. M. Bower]
– The Secret Garden [Frances Hodgson Burnett]
– A Little Princess [Frances Hodgson Burnett]
– Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland [Lewis Carroll]
– The King in Yellow [Robert William Chambers]
– The Man Who Knew Too Much [Gilbert Keith Chesterton]
– The Woman in White [Wilkie Collins]
– The Most Dangerous Game [Richard Connell]
– Robinson Crusoe [Daniel Defoe]
– On the Origin of Species, 6th Edition [Charles Darwin]
– The Iron Woman [Margaret Deland]
– David Copperfield [Charles Dickens]
– Oliver Twist [Charles Dickens]
– A Tale of Two Cities [Charles Dickens]
– The Double [Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky]
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes [Arthur Conan Doyle]
– The Curious Case of Benjamin Button [Francis Scott Fitzgerald]
– A Room with a View [E. M. Forster]
– Dream Psychology [Sigmund Freud]
– Tess of the d’Urbervilles [Thomas Hardy]
– Siddhartha [Hermann Hesse]
– Dubliners [James Joyce]
– The Fall of the House of Usher [Edgar Allan Poe]
– The Arabian Nights [Andrew Lang]
– The Sea Wolf [Jack London]
– The Call of Cthulhu [Howard Phillips Lovecraft]
– Anne of Green Gables [Lucy Maud Montgomery]
– Beyond Good and Evil [Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche]
– The Murders in the Rue Morgue [Edgar Allan Poe]
– The Black Cat [Edgar Allan Poe]
– The Raven [Edgar Allan Poe]
– Swann’s Way [Marcel Proust]
– Romeo and Juliet [William Shakespeare]
– Treasure Island [Robert Louis Stevenson]
– The Elements of Style [William Strunk Jr.
Vol 3 finished keeping for the historical record
– What’s Bred in the Bone [Grant Allen]
– The Golden Ass [Lucius Apuleius]
– Meditations [Marcus Aurelius]
– Northanger Abbey [Jane Austen]
– Lady Susan [Jane Austen]
– The Wonderful Wizard of Oz [Lyman Frank Baum]
– The Art of Public Speaking [Dale Breckenridge Carnegie]
– The Blazing World [Margaret Cavendish]
– The Wisdom of Father Brown [Gilbert Keith Chesterton]
– Heretics [Gilbert Keith Chesterton]
– The Donnington Affair [Gilbert Keith Chesterton]
– The Innocence of Father Brown [Gilbert Keith Chesterton]
– Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure [John Cleland]
– The Moonstone [Wilkie Collins]
– Lord Jim [Joseph Conrad]
– The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe [Daniel Defoe]
– The Pickwick Papers [Charles Dickens]
– A Christmas Carol [Charles Dickens]
– Notes From The Underground [Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky]
– The Gambler par Fyodor [Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky]
– The Lost World [Arthur Conan Doyle]
– The Hound of the Baskervilles [Arthur Conan Doyle]
– The Sign of the Four [Arthur Conan Doyle]
– The Man in the Iron Mask [Alexandre Dumas]
– The Three Musketeers [Alexandre Dumas]
– This Side of Paradise [Francis Scott Fitzgerald]
– Curious, If True: Strange Tales [Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell]
– King Solomon’s Mines [Henry Rider Haggard]
– The Hunchback of Notre Dame [Victor Hugo]
– Kim [Rudyard Kipling]
– Captain Courageous [Rudyard Kipling]
– The Jungle Book [Rudyard Kipling]
– Lady Chatterley’s Lover [David Herbert Lawrence]
– The Son of the Wolf [Jack London]
– The Einstein Theory of Relativity [Hendrik Antoon Lorentz]
– The Dunwich Horror [Howard Phillips Lovecraft]
– At the Mountains of Madness [Howard Phillips Lovecraft]
– The Prince [Niccolò Machiavelli]
– The Story Girl [Lucy Maud Montgomery]
– The Antichrist [Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche]
– The Republic [Plato]
– The Last Man [Mary Shelley]
– Life On The Mississippi [Mark Twain]
– The Kama Sutra [Vatsyayana]
– In the Year 2889 [Jules Verne]
– Around the World in Eighty Days [Jules Verne]
– Four Just Men [Edgar Wallace]
– Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ [Lewis Wallace]
– Jacob’s Room [Virginia Woolf]
Substack
https://jakecosmosaller.substack.com/p/review-of-my-antonio?r=3i9lm
