![]() ![]() "Cather makes a great romance of the loneliness of the artist's vocation."-Vivian Gornick The Song of the Lark, first published in 1915, evokes Cather's paradoxical fondness for and impatience with the small-town midwestern milieu of her childhood and illuminates her personal yearning for aesthetic transcendence. Characteristically, Cather uses the western landscape in The Song of the Lark both to reflect her heroine's inner live and to fire her imagination. Exhausted and depressed by the mediocrity around her, she seeks respite in the southwestern desert, where she has the epiphany that will transform her vision and art. ![]() Along the way she learns her own capacity for the rigorous demands of artistic excellence, and how few of her colleagues are willing to sacrifice ordinary vanities for exacting professional standards. A moving tale of a woman's devotion to her art-one of Willa Cather's most autobiographical novelsĬonflating her own childhood experiences with those of a celebrated Wagnerian soprano of her day, Willa Cather here introduces Thea Kronborg,a Scandinavian-American singer who rises from a one-story Colorado town to the Metropolitan Opera House. ![]()
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