Like Jim Burden, her narrator,in My Antonia, Willa Cather was moved from a childhood home in Virginia to a house near Red Cloud, Nebraska. She says in an interview in 1913, »I would not know how much a child’s life is bound up in the woods and hills and meadows around it,if I had not been jerked away from all these and thrown out into a country as bare as a piece of sheet iron. » Jim,looking out of the wagon on his first journey cannot pray because of the emptiness : »There was nothing but land : not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are mde. » Willa Cather returning as she describes Jim returning,when the land had been formed and the roads built,met again Annie Pavelka, the woman who was the direct original of My Antonia :like Jim,she formed friendships with her old friend’s many children,and the relationship survived the novel.
Willa Cather wrote of the origins of the novel : »One of the people who interested me most as a child was the Bohemian hired girl of one of our neighbours who was so good to me…But from what point of view should I write up ? »She decided to write as a detached observer,and as a young man « because much of what I knew about Annie came from the talks I had with the young men…There was enough material in that book for a lurid drama but I decided that in writing it I would dwell very lightly on those things a novelist would ordinarily emphasise,and make up my story of the little everyday happenings and occurrences that form the greatest part of everyone’s life and happiness. »
That last sentence sounds a little suspicious-a programme for a bucolic idyll which My Antonia is not.Miss Cather had a conscious idyllic intention :Jim Burden is discovered as a student reading Virgil’s Georgics,which meant a great deal to Willa Cather as astudent and writer. »Primus ego in patriam mecum…deducam Musas-I’ll be the first to bring the Muses of song to my birthplace. »She took from Virgil and Walt Whitman a sense that new art could