What do you think?
Rate this book
紅心王子 [Kurenai Ouji] #16
Willa Cather: Double Lives
Traces the life of the American novelist from her childhood in the newly settled prairies of Nebraska through her years as a journalist, editor, and teacher, and examines the relationship between what she wrote and who she was
424 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1989
27 people are currently reading
363 people want to read
About the author
Hermione Lee
73 books147 followersHermione Lee grew up in London and was educated at Oxford. She began her academic career as a lecturer at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va (Instructor, 1970-1971) and at Liverpool University (Lecturer, 1971-1977). She taught at the University of York from 1977, where over twenty years she was Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Reader, and Professor of English Literature. From 1998-2008 she was the Goldsmiths' Chair of English Literature and Fellow of New College at the University of Oxford. In 2008 Lee was elected President of Wolfson College, University of Oxford.
Lee is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda's and St Cross Colleges, Oxford. She has Honorary Doctorates from Liverpool and York Universities. In 2003 she was made a Commander of the British Empire for Services to Literature.
Lee is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda's and St Cross Colleges, Oxford. She has Honorary Doctorates from Liverpool and York Universities. In 2003 she was made a Commander of the British Empire for Services to Literature.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
April 29, 2014
A responsible but disappointing study. I had read all but one of the novels and many of the short stories, and wanted a biography. Unfortunately, despite the title, much of this volume is taken up with essays on the works, of varying quality. My objections:
• In the spirit of feminist criticism, activities and styles are regularly described as "male" and "female." It's hard to argue with some of these categories: sure, cooking has usually been done by women. But what critical insight is reached by pointing that out? Other times, especially in discussions of literary styles, the dichotomy reifies a difference that may not exist, or that may be one difference among many. Often the dichotomy simply paints the world in black and white only to point out contrasts that would not have been conspicuous had she (we) taken for granted that reality is complicated.
• Lee throws around the word "pastoral" so freely that it hardly seems to mean anything. I kept thinking, "Read Virgil's Eclogues and Paul Alpert's What Is Pastoral?!" and felt pedantic for doing so. What are the hallmarks of pastoral? Perhaps shepherds are dispensable, but the important thing is that sheepherding leaves Tityrus & company plenty of time for song contests, which makes pastoral the ideal meta-literary genre. Effort plays no role in the proceedings, which makes it very very different from Cather's prairie novels. Next, for all the descriptions of bowls of foaming cream, sheaves of wheat, and trees full of fruit, the shepherds hope for peace and are threatened by dispossession. These offstage dangers are again very different from what one finds in Cather's novels, where the hardships are very much in the foreground. And so on.
Lee does have a short critical discussion in which she distinguishes between "soft" pastoral and "hard" pastoral (ie, georgic, not pastoral at all), but that doesn't stop her from being careless. Too often the word seems to mean something, but closer inspection reveals that it means little more than that the novels are set in the country.
Lee rightly emphasizes the melancholy and the "vespertinal" quality of Cather's novels, and these are arguably characteristics of pastoral as well, but the sources of melancholy are not the same, and differences seem to outweigh the similarities.
• Finally, Cather's favorite novels are not my favorite novels. I know it seems capricious to condemn a book for this reason, but it was a bitter disappointment to read, in a study that was intended (I believe) to launch Cather in Britain, a grotesque overestimation of (to my mind) Cather's worst novel, My Antonia, and a polite condemnation of her best novel, Lucy Gayheart. I do believe that Cather's second-rate reputation can be attributed to all the praise showered on My Antonia: people read it, shrug their shoulders, and move on. Lee also underrates One of Ours, and she begins her discussion of it, unfairly, by quoting all the negative contemporary reviews and tacitly endorsing them. Nowhere does she mention that the magnificent first two thirds of the novel take place before Claude ever sees a battlefield, carefully and delicately building a character to whom, for all sorts of personal reasons that have nothing to do with world history, war seems like the perfect solution. Claude is idealistic about the war, and Cather manages to make his idealism sympathetic (and entirely in character) without endorsing it. Lee makes it sound like a work of simple-minded jingoistic patriotism.
The book is written in a pleasant, straight-forward style, and Cather fans will learn plenty (but not enough!) about the author's life. Someday I would like to read a real biography of Willa Cather. I look forward to reading Lee's biographies of Woolf and Wharton; by then, I think, Lee had come to think of herself as a biographer no less than a critic, and luckily Woolf and Wharton left behind veritable archives of letters, journals, and drafts, unlike Cather, who burned everything.
• In the spirit of feminist criticism, activities and styles are regularly described as "male" and "female." It's hard to argue with some of these categories: sure, cooking has usually been done by women. But what critical insight is reached by pointing that out? Other times, especially in discussions of literary styles, the dichotomy reifies a difference that may not exist, or that may be one difference among many. Often the dichotomy simply paints the world in black and white only to point out contrasts that would not have been conspicuous had she (we) taken for granted that reality is complicated.
• Lee throws around the word "pastoral" so freely that it hardly seems to mean anything. I kept thinking, "Read Virgil's Eclogues and Paul Alpert's What Is Pastoral?!" and felt pedantic for doing so. What are the hallmarks of pastoral? Perhaps shepherds are dispensable, but the important thing is that sheepherding leaves Tityrus & company plenty of time for song contests, which makes pastoral the ideal meta-literary genre. Effort plays no role in the proceedings, which makes it very very different from Cather's prairie novels. Next, for all the descriptions of bowls of foaming cream, sheaves of wheat, and trees full of fruit, the shepherds hope for peace and are threatened by dispossession. These offstage dangers are again very different from what one finds in Cather's novels, where the hardships are very much in the foreground. And so on.
Lee does have a short critical discussion in which she distinguishes between "soft" pastoral and "hard" pastoral (ie, georgic, not pastoral at all), but that doesn't stop her from being careless. Too often the word seems to mean something, but closer inspection reveals that it means little more than that the novels are set in the country.
Lee rightly emphasizes the melancholy and the "vespertinal" quality of Cather's novels, and these are arguably characteristics of pastoral as well, but the sources of melancholy are not the same, and differences seem to outweigh the similarities.
• Finally, Cather's favorite novels are not my favorite novels. I know it seems capricious to condemn a book for this reason, but it was a bitter disappointment to read, in a study that was intended (I believe) to launch Cather in Britain, a grotesque overestimation of (to my mind) Cather's worst novel, My Antonia, and a polite condemnation of her best novel, Lucy Gayheart. I do believe that Cather's second-rate reputation can be attributed to all the praise showered on My Antonia: people read it, shrug their shoulders, and move on. Lee also underrates One of Ours, and she begins her discussion of it, unfairly, by quoting all the negative contemporary reviews and tacitly endorsing them. Nowhere does she mention that the magnificent first two thirds of the novel take place before Claude ever sees a battlefield, carefully and delicately building a character to whom, for all sorts of personal reasons that have nothing to do with world history, war seems like the perfect solution. Claude is idealistic about the war, and Cather manages to make his idealism sympathetic (and entirely in character) without endorsing it. Lee makes it sound like a work of simple-minded jingoistic patriotism.
The book is written in a pleasant, straight-forward style, and Cather fans will learn plenty (but not enough!) about the author's life. Someday I would like to read a real biography of Willa Cather. I look forward to reading Lee's biographies of Woolf and Wharton; by then, I think, Lee had come to think of herself as a biographer no less than a critic, and luckily Woolf and Wharton left behind veritable archives of letters, journals, and drafts, unlike Cather, who burned everything.
February 11, 2024
Let me absolutely clear. I thoroughly detest Willa Cather. She is imperious, racist, condescending, deeply unpleasant to read, and all-around angering. And the only reason I'm on the Cather beat is because she's on the Modern Library list. But I will say that Hermione Lee has written an incredibly gracious biography of Cather. This book weirdly reminded me of Carl Wilson's LET TALK ABOUT LOVE. Lee is an advocate for the cream corn literary queen of Nebraska and while she didn't change my mind about the natural visceral disgust I have for Willa Cather, she is EXTREMELY FAIR AND GENTLE about owning up to Cather's significant flaws as a writer and a human. So while I despise Cather, I am over the moon about Lee and her literary scholarship here.
August 12, 2024
Willa Cather has always been one of my all time favorite authors. (I'm a born and raised Nebraska boy, how could I not be?) But I never really knew about her personal life or her writing process. "Willa Cather: Double Lives" does a fantastic job of showing both. A lot of it is biography by way of bibliography but that is fitting given Cather's notoriously private streak.
Learning what Cather did and didn't decide to put of herself in her novels and her process has helped with my own writing. For Cather fans, this is a must read!
Learning what Cather did and didn't decide to put of herself in her novels and her process has helped with my own writing. For Cather fans, this is a must read!
April 4, 2021
I really loved this criticism. Hermione Lee writes so well that I'd have enjoyed this, were I not interested in Willa Cather. I'll be looking out for Lee's work, from now on!
December 21, 2018
I was expecting a straight biography of Cather so I was disappointed when the book started with long discussions of her writings as well as her connections with feminism and cross-dressing. But as the book continued I started to really get into it. I've read many of the novels over the yearend she is a favorite of mine. The books vary in setting, though we think abutter always benign the Western plains. Yet Lucy Gayheart is in Chicago while Death Comes for the Archbishop is in New Mexico. The book led me to want to read some books I had missed over the years; Professor's House and The Song of the Lark. for example.
This is a worthwhile book that anyone with even a slight interest in Cather should pick up.
This is a worthwhile book that anyone with even a slight interest in Cather should pick up.
February 9, 2013
I didn't love this one as much as the Woolf biography. Probably, partly because I'm so much more of a Woolf fan but also because Lee hadn't honed her craft as much by this point and because Cather left very little to be recorded of her life. Anyway, worth a read for Cather fans.
August 21, 2012
Learned more about Willa Cather and her writing. Now I'm on to some of her novels--always a good sign of a good biography.
December 12, 2021
After loving Hermione Lee's biographies of Penelope Fitzgerald and Edith Wharton, I was disappointed in this book. As other reviewers have noted, the book focuses more on Cather's writing than on her life. It wasn't until the second to last chapter that I started to feel I was getting to know Cather a little because Lee includes a description of Cather by Louise Bogan. I gather that, since Lee wrote the book before the embargo on quoting Cather's letters was lifted, Lee felt constrained to follow Cather's wish to be known through her books and to keep her private life private. Certainly, Lee was very insightful in her discussion of Cather's writing (and it did make me want to reread Cather's books), but the details about Cather that Lee did include were not the kind to make me feel drawn to Willa Cather. For example her long-time companion is Edith Lewis, "who, in the end, would be buried at [Cather's] feet." Lee definitely shies away from speculating on Cather's relationships with her long-time friends, which I appreciated on the one hand - the biography doesn't become a gossip rag - but since Lee is the biographer who's been privy to Cather's letters, I would have liked it if she'd shared more about the woman herself.
If you are curious about Willa Cather's books, this might be a good place to start. But if you want to know more about Cather, another biography might be a better choice.
If you are curious about Willa Cather's books, this might be a good place to start. But if you want to know more about Cather, another biography might be a better choice.
March 13, 2024
I have read several Willa Cather books. While she is most renowned for her novel “My Ántonia”, her literary contributions extend far beyond that. This is the second Cather biography that I have read. Hermione Lee goes into great detail related to the characters and significance of each of Cather's books. If you have read the Cather book being reviewed, Lee's description adds meaning to your reading. If you have not read the book being discussed, or do not plan on reading the book, the descriptions do not create much value.
Considering the depth of analysis provided by Lee, this biography would be an excellent addition to a Literature class focusing on Cather’s works. It could offer valuable insights and discussions for students studying her writings as a subject matter.
Considering the depth of analysis provided by Lee, this biography would be an excellent addition to a Literature class focusing on Cather’s works. It could offer valuable insights and discussions for students studying her writings as a subject matter.
February 17, 2020
Not a biography so much as a chronological literary criticism of Cather's works. I learned so very little about one of my favorite authors, and didn't remember the plots well enough of her works (95% of which I've read), to be anything but bored by the rehash. Well, that's not entirely true: the only time I wasn't bored was when Lee included passages from the books, and I could enjoy Cather's writing, if only in snippets. I understand that Cather was a fiercely private person, but if you can't provide more of a life than this, maybe she's not for you to write about.
July 6, 2018
A very well written book about Cather and her writing, but for some reason it just didn't grab me. Lots of literary analysis, but a bit skimpy on her life. However, it IS making me eager to read or reread her work.
April 9, 2011
I am devoted to Willa Cather. So many things that I'm looking for in a novelist are present in her writing; history, a palpable sense of place, family struggles, artistic struggles and just dazzlingly poetic writing. The Song of the Lark is truly one of my favorite books and I've read most of the other novels.
I bought this book looking for details about her life and some reflection about its relationship to her writing. I was curious to see how she created her work out of her life...
Like many other readers, I was frustrated by the dominant critical analyses of her novels which replaced biographical prose to a certain extent. This isn't to say these analyses weren't interesting. I just felt that I would have to go back and reread some of the novels in order to make it worthwhile.
It is interesting to see that other fans consider totally different novels exceptional.
I didn't know that she won the Pulitzer Prize for One of ours and against Hemingway! That was indeed a juicy bit of historical gossip. It's startling to see that this novel has faded while others have come forward.
I bought this book looking for details about her life and some reflection about its relationship to her writing. I was curious to see how she created her work out of her life...
Like many other readers, I was frustrated by the dominant critical analyses of her novels which replaced biographical prose to a certain extent. This isn't to say these analyses weren't interesting. I just felt that I would have to go back and reread some of the novels in order to make it worthwhile.
It is interesting to see that other fans consider totally different novels exceptional.
I didn't know that she won the Pulitzer Prize for One of ours and against Hemingway! That was indeed a juicy bit of historical gossip. It's startling to see that this novel has faded while others have come forward.
January 31, 2011
A solid, if unexciting, take on this great American novelist's life and times. She wrote about the lost pioneer spirit and is still somewhat underrated outside the US. More of a critical biography than a straightforward life story, so it helps to have read a sizeable chunk of Cather's work beforehand. I've only read two of her books and it didn't feel like enough, but Hermione Lee's reappraisal has encouraged me to read more.
February 22, 2011
Read large sections related to the literature I had read. This volume is more critical study of her work and comparison to Cather's own life (and seeing inspiration for work) rather than biography. Lee has more recent work on Cather which is probably more encompassing.
Read
July 4, 2022très mimi.... j'adore les épisodes flashbacks alors je ne suis pas déçue !! mais le père de kojirô est vraiment un loseeeeer omg comment ça tu abandonnes tes trois enfants à la première occasion ?! 🏆 du mauvais père
Read
March 5, 201810/10 would recommend for any fans of Willa out there <3
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews