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Nascent lesbians assigned to read O Pioneers for American lit classes for decaded now have quite likely arrived at a similar conclusion about Willa Cather about 100 or so pages into her famous novel about heroine Alexandra Bergson, the resilient, enterprising head of her family’s farm. Author Willa Cather’s prose pings way lesbian!
One of the great American writers at the turn of the 20th century, Cather breathed life into stories, primarily about the Plains, in My Antonia, Death Comes for the Archbishop, Song of the Lark and more. Rumors of Cather’s lesbianism have clung to her for decades, but now, her love letters to other women are about to be published, according to The New York Times.
Since her death in 1947 there has been a ban on publishing the letters that was part of her will, but next month, a nearly 600-page anthology of her correspondences entitled The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, will be published by Knopf.
But don’t expect any Cather lesbian erotica on the prairie any time soon. The letters, while revealing her attachment to women, are fairly staid, according to NYT.
“The letters do not yield steamy intimate detail,” NYT reported. “But they do make clear that Cather’s primary emotional attachments were to women, while also laying to rest what the volume’s editors, in interviews, called a persistent urban legend: that of the fanatically secretive author eager to erase any record of shameful desire.”
The editors of the anthology Janis Stout and Andrew Jewell acknowledge in the book’s preface that publication of the letters “flagrantly” violates Cather’s wishes in the will that partially expired in 2011, according to NYT. But the editors claim that the letters are essential to further understanding of Cather as a major literary artist.
“These lively, illuminating letters will do nothing to damage her reputation,” Stout and Jewell write, insisting the letters will reveal Cather to be “a complicated, funny, brilliant, flinty, sensitive, sometimes confounding human being.”
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Tracy E. Gilchrist is the VP, Executive Producer of Entertainment for the Advocate Channel. A media veteran, she writes about the intersections of LGBTQ+ equality and pop culture. Previously, she was the editor-in-chief of The Advocate and the first feminism editor for the 55-year-old brand. In 2017, she launched the company's first podcast, The Advocates. She is an experienced broadcast interviewer, panel moderator, and public speaker who has delivered her talk, "Pandora's Box to Pose: Game-changing Visibility in Film and TV," at universities throughout the country.
Tracy E. Gilchrist is the VP, Executive Producer of Entertainment for the Advocate Channel. A media veteran, she writes about the intersections of LGBTQ+ equality and pop culture. Previously, she was the editor-in-chief of The Advocate and the first feminism editor for the 55-year-old brand. In 2017, she launched the company's first podcast, The Advocates. She is an experienced broadcast interviewer, panel moderator, and public speaker who has delivered her talk, "Pandora's Box to Pose: Game-changing Visibility in Film and TV," at universities throughout the country.
