The Song of the Lark

The Song of the Lark appeared in 1915, Willa Cather's third published novel, and it follows a singer from a Colorado town to the opera houses of Europe. Its title comes from a painting Cather had seen in Chicago, and the woman at the centre of it, Thea Kronborg, is one of the earliest portraits in American fiction of an artist who happens to be a woman and is not in the least apologetic about it.

Moonstone is small enough that everyone knows what to expect of the preacher's daughter, and Thea spends her childhood being useful: playing the organ, leading hymns, charming the men who pass through on the railroad. Her education arrives from odd angles, through a German piano teacher who recognises something in her, a doctor who becomes her ally, and the wider world glimpsed through the newspaper and the church. The town's other children, the boys who work in the fields and the girls who marry early, are shown going about lives she cannot share.

Cather is less interested in Thea's success than in what it costs, and the middle chapters move her to Chicago and then to Arizona, where the ancient cliff dwellings she has always wanted to see give her the room to work out what her art is for. Around her the West is changing, and the small town, the railway and those older homes stand in for everything she is leaving behind.