The essays offer compelling ways of seeing and situating Willa Cather's texts-both unsettling and advancing Cather scholarship. Cather was born and spent her first nine years in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Here, as an observant daughter of a privileged white family, Cather first encountered differences and dislocations that remained lively, productive, and sometimes deeply troubling sites of tension and energy throughout her writing life. These essays range from examinations of how race shapes and misshapes Cather's final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, to challenges to criticisms of her 1935 novel, Lucy Gayheart.
