seek integration with the American mainstream, others who by reason of their extraordinary qualities create and live extraordinary lives.
The specific role that Cather's gender may have played in her development as a writer and in the development of her fiction has been a subject of much critical inquiry. Seeking to identify a female "voice" in her fiction, early critics sought to explain her work in terms of the fact that she was a career woman who lived the artist's life in the first half of the twentieth century, what one would now call a "liberated woman." The earlier critics were loath to mention certain other aspects of Cather's personal life (suggested by the William Cather portion of it) that may have influenced her writing. More recent critics, less constrained by discretion or social delicacy, have noted with frankness that Cather was a lesbian who appears to have privately acknowledged the nature of her sexuality but who never "came out," as the phrase goes. But finally, whatever may have influenced the fiction, it must speak for itself, and one thing that it says is that serious novels can have women at the center of the action rather than, as in the case of so many novels written by Cather's male contemporaries, subsidiary to it.
Although a consistency of voice, technique, and circumstance can be discerned in Cather's fiction, she is an accomplished enough artist not to write the same story or of the same kind of characters over and over. Rather, she explores a wide range of human behavior and psychology, and does so from several points of view.
The emergence of a feminist perspective in literary and social criticism in recent years suggests that Cather's work can be read in connection with concerns about psychology, morality, behavior, and the culture as a whole that are specifically female in emphasis. Cather seems to have anticipated some of the attitudes about the verities of human behavior and...