PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Willa Cather was born in Virginia in 1873 and moved to Nebraska, with its wide open plains and immigrant farming communities, at the age of nine. This landscape would deeply affect her later writing. She attended university and became a journalist and teacher in Pittsburgh, and then a magazine editor in New York. Her first major novel, O Pioneers!, appeared in 1913 and was followed by two more in her prairie trilogy, The Song of the Lark and My Antonia, as well as her masterpiece Death Comes for the Archbishop. She lived with the editor Edith Lewis for thirty-nine years until her death in 1947.
Takes a knife and stabs you through the heart, by its joining of such ravishment with such pessimism * New Yorker * The most sensuous of writers, Willa Cather builds her imagined world almost as solidly as our five senses build the universe around us -- Rebecca West Her voice, laconical and richly sensuous, sings out with a note of unequivocal love for the people she is setting down on the page -- Marina Warner
