Editing Willa Cather (section)

==Writing influences==
Cather admired [[Henry James]]'s use of language and characterization.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Cather |first1=Willa |editor1-last=Curtin |editor1-first=William M. |title=The World and the Parish: Willa Cather's Articles and Reviews, 1893–1902 |year=2004 |publisher=University of Nebraska Press |isbn=978-0-80321-544-3 |page=248 |edition=[Repr. of the 1970]}}</ref> While Cather enjoyed the novels of several women—including [[George Eliot]],<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Laird |first1=David |title=Willa Cather's Women: Gender, Place, and Narrativity in "O Pioneers!" and "My Ántonia" |journal=Great Plains Quarterly |year=1992 |volume=12 |issue=4 |pages=242–253 |jstor=23531660 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/23531660 |issn=0275-7664}}</ref> the [[Brontë family|Brontës]], and [[Jane Austen]]—she regarded most women writers with disdain, judging them overly sentimental.{{r|Woodress|page=110}} One contemporary exception was [[Sarah Orne Jewett]], who became Cather's friend and mentor.{{efn-ua|Some sources describe the relationship using stronger language: as Cather being Jewett's protégé.<ref>{{cite news |last1=Rosenberg |first1=Liz |title=SARAH ORNE JEWETT: A 'NATURALLY AMERICAN' WRITER |url=https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1993-05-16-9305160494-story.html |access-date=February 4, 2021 |work=Chicago Tribune |date=May 16, 1993}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Shannon |first1=Laurie |title="The Country of Our Friendship": Jewett's Intimist Art |journal=American Literature |year=1999 |volume=71 |issue=2 |pages=227–262 |jstor=2902810 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/2902810 |issn=0002-9831}}</ref> Either way, Jewett's remarkable influence on Cather is evidenced not only by her commitment to regionalism,<ref>{{cite journal |last1=REYNOLDS |first1=GUY |title=The Transatlantic Virtual Salon: Cather and the British |journal=Studies in the Novel |year=2013 |volume=45 |issue=3 |pages=349–368 |jstor=23594847 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/23594847 |issn=0039-3827}}</ref> but also by Cather's (perhaps overstated) role in editing ''[[The Country of the Pointed Firs]]''.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Homestead |first1=Melissa |title=Willa Cather Editing Sarah Orne Jewett |journal=American Literary Realism |year=2016 |volume=49 |issue=1 |pages=63–89 |doi=10.5406/amerlitereal.49.1.0063 |jstor=10.5406/amerlitereal.49.1.0063 |s2cid=164607316 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/amerlitereal.49.1.0063 |issn=1540-3084}}</ref>}} Jewett advised Cather of several things: to use female narrators in her fiction (even though Cather preferred using male perspectives),<ref>{{cite news |last1=Rose |first1=Phyllis |title=THE POINT OF VIEW WAS MASCULINE |work=The New York Times |date=September 11, 1983 |page=92}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Carlin |first1=Deborah |title=Cather's Jewett: Relationship, Influence, and Representation |journal=Cather Studies |year=2015 |volume=10 |doi=10.2307/j.ctt1d98c6j.12 |url=https://cather.unl.edu/scholarship/catherstudies/10/cs010.carlin}}</ref> to write about her "[[American literary regionalism|own country]]" (''O Pioneers!'' was dedicated to Jewett),<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Cary |first1=Richard |title=The Sculptor and the Spinster: Jewett's "Influence"on Cather |journal=Colby Quarterly |year=1973 |volume=10 |issue=3 |pages=168–178}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Smith |first1=Eleanor M. |title=The Literary Relationship of Sarah Orne Jewett and Willa Sibert Cather |journal=The New England Quarterly |year=1956 |volume=29 |issue=4 |pages=472–492 |doi=10.2307/362140 |jstor=362140 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/362140 |issn=0028-4866}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Thorberg |first1=Raymond |title=Willa Cather: From Alexander's Bridge to My Antonia |journal=Twentieth Century Literature |year=1962 |volume=7 |issue=4 |pages=147–158 |doi=10.2307/440922 |jstor=440922 |url=http://www.jstor.com/stable/440922 |issn=0041-462X}}</ref> and to write fiction that explicitly represented romantic attraction between women.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Homestead |first1=Melissa J. |title=Willa Cather, Sarah Orne Jewett, and the Historiography of Lesbian Sexuality |journal=Cather Studies |year=2015 |volume=10 |doi=10.2307/j.ctt1d98c6j.5 |url=https://cather.unl.edu/scholarship/catherstudies/10/cs010.homestead |access-date=February 4, 2021}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Donovan |first1=Josephine |title=The Unpublished Love Poems of Sarah Orne Jewett |journal=Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies |year=1979 |volume=4 |issue=3 |pages=26–31 |doi=10.2307/3346145 |jstor=3346145 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/3346145 |issn=0160-9009 |quote=In fact, Jewett was quite aware of the temptation to fictionally disguise female-female relationships as heterosexual love stories, and consciously rejected it. One of her most pointed critical comments to the young Willa Cather was to advise her against doing this kind of "masquerading" in her future work.}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Pryse |first1=Marjorie |title=Sex, Class, and "Category Crisis": Reading Jewett's Transitivity |journal=American Literature |year=1998 |volume=70 |issue=3 |pages=517–549 |doi=10.2307/2902708 |jstor=2902708 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/2902708 |issn=0002-9831}}</ref>{{efn-ua|Jewett wrote in a letter to Cather, "with what deep happiness and recognition I have read the "McClure" story,—night before last I found it with surprise and delight. It made me feel very near to the writer's young and loving heart. You have drawn your two figures of the wife and her husband with unerring touches and wonderful tenderness for her. It makes me the more sure that you are far on your road toward a fine and long story of very high class. The lover is as well done as he could be when a woman writes in the man's character,—it must always, I believe, be something of a masquerade. I think it is safer to write about him as you did about the others, and not try to be he! And you could almost have done it as yourself—a woman could love her in that same protecting way—a woman could even care enough to wish to take her away from such a life, by some means or other. But oh, how close—how tender—how true the feeling is!"<ref>{{cite book |last1=Jewett |first1=Sarah Orne |editor1-last=Fields |editor1-first=Annie |title=Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett |date=1911 |publisher=Houghton Mifflin company |pages=246–7}}</ref>}} Cather was also influenced by the work of [[Katherine Mansfield]],<ref name="affect" /> praising in an essay Mansfield's ability "to throw a luminous streak out onto the shadowy realm of personal relationships."<ref>{{cite book |last1=Cather |first1=Willa |title=Not Under Forty |year=1936 |publisher=Alfred A. Knopf |page=135}}</ref>

Cather's high regard for the immigrant families forging lives and enduring hardships on the Nebraska plains shaped much of her fiction. The [[Burlington Depot, Red Cloud, NE|Burlington Depot in Red Cloud]] brought in many strange and wonderful people to her small town. As a child, she visited immigrant families in her area and returned home in "the most unreasonable state of excitement," feeling that she "had got inside another person's skin."{{r|bennet|pp=169–170}} After a trip to Red Cloud in 1916, Cather decided to write a novel based on the events in the life of her childhood friend [[Annie Sadilek Pavelka]], a [[Bohemia]]n girl who became the model for the title character in ''My Ántonia''.<ref name="possession"/><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Harris |first1=Richard C. |title=First Loves: Willa Cather's Niel Herbert and Ivan Turgenev's Vladimir Petrovich |journal=Studies in American Fiction |year=1989 |volume=17 |issue=1 |page=81 |doi=10.1353/saf.1989.0007|s2cid=161309570 }}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=MURPHY |first1=DAVID |title=Jejich Antonie: Czechs, the Land, Cather, and the Pavelka Farmstead |journal=Great Plains Quarterly |year=1994 |volume=14 |issue=2 |pages=85–106 |jstor=23531597 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/23531597 |issn=0275-7664}}</ref> Cather was likewise fascinated by the French-Canadian pioneers from [[Quebec]] who had settled in the Red Cloud area while she was a girl.<ref name="neighbors">Danker, Kathleen (Winter 2000). "The Influence of Willa Cather's French-Canadian Neighbors in Nebraska in ''Death Comes for the Archbishop'' and ''Shadows on the Rock''." ''Great Plains Quarterly''. p. 34.</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last1=Carr |first1=Thomas M. |title=A French Canadian Community Becomes 'French Country': The 1912 Funeral at the Center of Cather's O Pioneers! |journal=Willa Cather Newsletter & Review |year=2016 |volume=59 |issue=1 |pages=21–26 |url=https://www.willacather.org/system/files/idxdocs/willacather_newsletter_summer_2016_final2.pdf |access-date=February 3, 2021}}</ref>

During a brief stopover in Quebec with Edith Lewis in 1927, Cather was inspired to write a novel set in that French-Canadian city. Lewis recalled: "From the first moment that she looked down from the windows of the [Chateau] Frontenac [Hotel] on the pointed roofs and [[Norman architecture|Norman]] outlines of the town of Quebec, Willa Cather was not merely stirred and charmed—she was overwhelmed by the flood of memories, recognition, surmise it called up; by the sense of its extraordinary French character, isolated and kept intact through hundreds of years, as if by a miracle, on this great un-French continent."{{r|Woodress|pages=414–15}} Cather finished her novel ''Shadows on the Rock'', a historical novel set in 17th-century Quebec, in 1931;<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Haller |first1=Evelyn |title="Shadows On The Rock": A Book in American English Ezra Pound Gave His Daughter That She Might Learn His Mother Tongue And More |journal=Paideuma |year=2010 |volume=37 |pages=245–265 |jstor=24726727 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/24726727 |issn=0090-5674}}</ref> it was later included in ''[[Life (magazine)|Life]]'' magazine's list of the 100 outstanding books of 1924–1944.<ref>Canby, Henry Seidel. "The 100 Outstanding Books of 1924–1944". ''Life'', August 14, 1944. Chosen in collaboration with the magazine's editors.</ref> The French influence is found in many other Cather works, including ''Death Comes for the Archbishop'' (1927) and her final, unfinished novel set in [[Avignon]], ''Hard Punishments''.<ref name="neighbors" />