n (rather than heir to a family fortune) possessed of a state university education whose reputation as a respected American novelist placed her, right along with Shakespeare and Dante, on a short list of outstanding woman novelists. If there is a female literary tradition, surely Cather is a part of it, not merely because as a woman writer she is admired but because women characters their psychology, hopes, dreams, fears, power, weakness, anger, and the rest are so often at the center of her effort. This does not mean that what could be called "women's issues" in the sociopolitical or economic sense are Cather's chief concern. Indeed, on the whole critics take far more note of her status as chronicler of regional America or her interest in the life of the artist. Nevertheless, Cather's women reveal something more than the fact that, say, women were around when the American prairies were being settled or that talented women could develop operatic careers. Through her novels, Cather obliges the reader to consider women whether pioneer, opera star, adulteress, or aristocrat in new ways, and so perhaps discover something new about the reality of the world.
How Willa Cather puts women at the center of her fiction may be seen in a number of ways, which are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The focus of direct narrative action on women's actions is one means, as with Alexandra Bergson in O Pioneers!, Lucy in Lucy Gayheart, or Tommy in the story "Tommy, the Unsentimental." Another method is for one or more characters to interact with women who move the primary action of the story along, as Sapphira interacts variously with Colbert, her daughter Rachel, Nancy, and Martin in Sapphira and the Slave Girl or Thea Kronborg behaves with Doctor Archie, her music teachers, and Robert in The Song of the Lark.
Then there is the more complex literary relationship between Cather's women characters and the psychology of their creator. S...