SOURCE: Bremer, Sidney H. “Willa Cather's Lost Chicago Sisters.” In Women Writers and the Essays in Feminist Literary Criticism, edited by Susan Merrill Squier, pp. 210-29. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984.

In the following essay, Bremer draws contrasts between women and male writers of the Chicago literary renaissance, noting that the novels written by women have been overlooked by critics but are no less worthy of attention.

Most American literary critics can tick off some half-dozen novels from the first phase of the “Chicago literary renaissance”: Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900) at the top of the lists, then The Jungle (1906) by Upton Sinclair and The Pit (1903) by Frank Norris, probably Robert Herrick's Memoirs of an American Citizen (1905) and Dreiser's The Titan (1914), and, maybe, The Song of the Lark (1914) by Willa Cather. Indeed Cather's novel does belong to these ranks in quality. But it doesn't quite fit in kind. The...