A masterly biography of one of America's most important twentieth century writers, written by acclaimed biographer Hermione Lee.

'The biographer's enthusiasm for her subject illuminates every page' HILARY MANTEL

'Hermione Lee's enthusiasm for this misunderstood writer is contagious' MAUREEN FREELY, OBSERVER

'Hermione Lee . . . must be congratulated for bringing us to her measured, humane, unflinching voice' LITERARY REVIEW

A biography of Willa Cather (1873-1947), who spent years working as a journalist, teacher and editor of a New York magazine whose deepest feelings were directed towards women. Her friendships from Sarah Orne Jewett and Dorothy Canfield to Stephen Tennant and Yehudi Menuhin were important to her. Although, as she became more famous, she withdrew increasingly from the modern world she disliked.

Willa Cather's fiction charts new, female versions of epic pioneering heroism and the extraordinary cultural encounters of the New World history. This major reinterpretation of Cather's work explores that American context and those traditions but finds a strange and disconcerting Cather a writer of split identities, sexual conflict, dramatic energies and stoic fatalism. The author has written books on Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf and Philip Roth and The Short Stories of Willa Cather .