In Miss Cather’s quarter of the country there were still heroes during the days she has written about, still pioneers.  The sod and swamps of her Nebraska prairies defy the hands of labor almost as obstinately as did the stones and forests of old New England.  Her Americans, like all the Agamemnons back of Miss Jewett’s world, are fresh from Europe, locked in a mortal conflict with nature.  If now and then the older among them grow faint at remembering Bohemia or France or Scandinavia, this is not the predominant mood of their communities.  They ride powerfully forward on a wave of confident energy, as if human life had more dawns than sunsets in it.  For the most part her pioneers are unreflective creatures, driven by some inner force which they do not comprehend:  they are, that is perhaps no more than to say, primitive and epic in their dispositions.

Is it by virtue of a literary descent from the New England school that Miss Cather depends so frequently upon women as protagonists?  Alexandra Bergson in O Pioneers!, Thea Kronborg in The Song of the Lark, Antonia Shimerda in My Antonia—­around these as girls and women the actions primarily revolve.  It is not, however, as other Helens or Gudruns that they affect their universes; they are not the darlings of heroes but heroes themselves.  Alexandra drags her dull brothers after her and establishes the family fortunes; Antonia, less positive and more pathetic, still holds the center of her retired stage by her rich, warm, deep goodness; Thea, a genius in her own right, outgrows her Colorado birthplace and becomes a famous singer with all the fierce energy of a pioneer who happens to be an instinctive artist rather than an instinctive manager, like Alexandra, or an instinctive mother, like Antonia.  And is it because women are here protagonists that neither wars, as among the ancients, nor machines, as among the moderns, promote the principal activities of the characters?  Less the actions than the moods of these novels have the epic air.  Narrow as Miss Cather’s scene may be, she fills it with a spaciousness and candor of personality that quite transcends the gnarled eccentricity and timid inhibitions of the local colorists.  Passion blows through her chosen characters like a free, wholesome, if often devastating wind; it does not, as with Miss Jewett and her contemporaries, lurk in furtive corners or hide itself altogether.  And as these passions are most commonly the passions of home-keeping women, they lie nearer to the core of human existence than if they arose out of the complexities of a wider region.