Willa Cather began her career as a journalist in Pittsburgh and later worked for high-profile New York magazines but, in her thirties, she began to write the novels, largely set in the Midwest she knew from her childhood, which made her name. O Pioneers!, for example, is the story of a Swedish immigrant family, the Bergsons, and their struggles to make a living from their prairie farmstead. Her finest and, in many ways, most characteristic novel, My Antonia, has a similar setting. Through the eyes of the narrator Jim Burden, the book tells the life story of Antonia Shimerda, the eldest daughter of a family of immigrant farmers in Nebraska. Antonia is a powerful personality - she 'had always been one to leave images in the mind that did not fade', according to Burden - and, in the course of the novel, her strength and determination to survive are severely tested. When she is still only a teenager, her father, homesick and unable to settle in his new country, commits suicide. Forced to work for others, she struggles to retain her independence and her sense of self-worth. As a young woman, an unhappy and ill-fated love affair leaves her with an illegitimate child and a tarnished reputation. Yet when Burden, by now a successful city lawyer, returns after twenty years to visit the land he knew in his childhood, he finds that Antonia has married a fellow immigrant and is at the centre of a large and happy family. My Antonia is a powerful testament to both the landscape of Nebraska and the people who pioneered its cultivation. It is also a compelling portrait of the enduring friendship between Burden and Antonia and of Antonia herself, an apparently ordinary woman who, the novel shows, has extraordinary resilience and determination to make something of her life.

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