Its voice is that of middle-aged Jim Burden, recalling his Nebraska youth, especially the fascinating Bohemian girl Ántonia. Years later, Jim revisits Nebraska to renew their friendship. The sympathies of “My Ántonia” are populist, its humble nobility the homesteader, the housewife, the farmhand, the hired girl. As ambitious Jim heads east, Ántonia is a disgraced, unmarried mother drudging on the farm for a churlish brother. Cather was skeptical—“I prefer horses to automobiles,” she informed an interviewer—but “My Ántonia” neither lectures nor moralizes.

Source: Wall Street Journal September 14, 2018 19:41 UTC