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“[A] Woman of Her Time and People”: Cather's Early Short Fiction and the Challenges of Modernity

These days, before I sit down at my computer and begin a new writing project, I attempt to clear my mind and desk of the accumulated clutter of weeks of work that seem unrelated to my writing. Documents pertaining to the daily work of university management, student papers marked and recorded and unreturned, cups stained with coffee, notes in every shape and color all find their way to the floor or to the sink or to a shelf before I begin. The work of all writers begins, I suspect, with this sorting and ordering, mental or literal, and Willa Cather must have begun her work in much the same way. Toiling away at competing and multiple projects, sharing her brain work and time with her art and her livelihood, Cather found a way to push aside the tasks of daily life in order to explore fully the complex lives of every kind of character and setting. Like many of her characters, Cather accomplished the difficult life of artist and modern professional woman. Forced by material need to attend to both her artistic life and a working life in Pittsburgh, where she toiled as journal editor and writer, she eventually abandoned this busy career and took up high school teaching so that she would have the summers to write. Still she had too little time. Later, as managing editor at McClure’s magazine, Cather had less time to devote to her fiction. Even after she left the magazine she still had her own livelihood to consider, and so she continued to write for McClure’s for several years in order to meet her expenses. In a letter to Sarah Orne Jewett on December 19, 1908, she described feeling confused, tired, drained