Writing Influences
Cather admired Henry James as a "mighty master of language and keen student of human actions and motives." She generally preferred past literary masters to contemporary writers. Some particular favorites were Dickens, Thackeray, Emerson, Hawthorne, Balzac, Flaubert, and Tolstoy.
While Cather enjoyed the novels of George Eliot, the Brontës, and Jane Austen, she regarded most women writers with disdain, judging them overly sentimental and mawkish. Cather's biographer James Woodress notes that Cather "so completely ... embraced masculine values that when she wrote about women writers, she sounded like a patronizing man." One contemporary exception was Sarah Orne Jewett, who became Cather's friend and mentor. Jewett advised Cather to use female narrators in her fiction, but Cather preferred to write from a male point of view. Jewett also encouraged Cather to write about subjects that had "teased the mind" for years. Chief among these subjects were the people and experiences Cather remembered from her years in Nebraska. She dedicated O Pioneers!, the first novel in her Prairie Trilogy, to Jewett.
Read more about this topic: Willa Cather
Famous quotes containing the words writing and/or influences:
“I have spent so long erecting partitions around the part of me that writeslearning how to close the door on it when ordinary life intervenes, how to close the door on ordinary life when its time to start writing againthat Im not sure I could fit the two parts of me back together now.”
—Anne Tyler (b. 1941)
“However diligent she may be, however dedicated, no mother can escape the larger influences of culture, biology, fate . . . until we can actually live in a society where mothers and children genuinely matter, ours is an essentially powerless responsibility. Mothers carry out most of the work orders, but most of the rules governing our lives are shaped by outside influences.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)