When I was home and desperate for something to read I found an old Willa Cather paperback I think my husband had for the cover art. I don’t ever remember reading her famous O Pioneers! or My Antonia. This was the last novel she wrote called Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940) and takes place in Virginia where she was born.
It’s about Henry and Sapphira Colbert who run a mill and hold about a dozen slaves. Sapphira is comfortable with slavery, Henry is not. Sapphira suspects wrongly her slave, Nancy, is intimate with her husband. She responds by mistreating Nancy and invites a nephew to the estate, who is a scoundrel and threatens Nancy with rape. Sapphira’s daughter, Rachel, and two neighbors help Nancy to escape by underground railroad to Canada. She returns 40 years later to an emancipated South. It was an interesting story, with the subject of slavery viewed from all sides and a happy ending.
Last Sunday’s NY Times Book Review had a review of The Selected Letters of Willa Cather. She considered her letters “entirely personal and confidential” but the editors felt the statute of limitations on the author’s personal preference had expired. They praise her work and feel she is undervalued, compared to her contemporaries like Hemingway and Fitzgerald. (They are “dashing and cosmopolitan” and she is “frumpy and rural.”)
Perhaps her work will have a revival.