My Mortal Enemy

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of O Pioneers! presents a moving study of an ambitious woman and her troubled marriage in this 1926 novella. When young Myra Driscoll is forced to choose between a large inheritance from her great-uncle and marrying the man she loves, she follows her heart. She and Oswald Henshawe leave their small Illinois town to pursue a future together in New York City. Years later, fifteen-year-old Nellie Birdseye meets Myra Henshawe and her husband. She thinks of Myra as a legend at first. But the more Nellie gets to know the bold, seemingly sophisticated Myra, the more she sees the reality beneath the fantasy—and her romantic notions begin to slip away . . . Known for novels like O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and The Song of the Lark, Willa Cather wrote predominately about pioneers and the American West. In 1923, she won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel One of Ours..

My Mortal Enemy is the eighth novel American author Willa Cather. It was first published in 1926. Wikipedia.

This unforgettable novella takes readers on a poignant journey through a failing marriage and offers a tragic depiction of the marriage paradox: how to reconcile youth’s romantic exuberance with growing disillusionment, bitterness, and regret..

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Volume 3 of Cather Studies demonstrates the range of topics and approaches in contemporary discussions of Willa Cather?s work for the informed reader or the specialized student. In fourteen essays, critics and scholars examine Cather?s Catholic Progressivism, her literary relations with William Faulkner, and her place in the multicultural canon of American literature..

Willa Cather’s darkest and most dramatic work, My Mortal Enemy is an agonisingly honest examination of marriage, love, and the evolution of a single person’s life. This 1926 novella depicts a life set for fortune that ultimately results in spite and bitterness. Myra Henshawe, an Irish Catholic, abandoned her uncle and her fortuitous inheritance, instead eloping with her true love, an Ulster Protestant. But is love alone enough to sustain a marriage? As Myra ages and her husband’s economic position worsens, she grows resentful and is filled with regret. The narrator, Nellie Birdseye, is a young woman who has met Myra three times. She has also been filled with many stories and snippets of gossip about the infamous woman from her Aunt Lydia, who helped Myra elope. Towards the end of Myra’s life, it is Nellie who comforts her, and Willa Cather poses a revelatory question to her readers about the true enemy in one’s life. Featuring an introductory essay by H. L. Mencken, My Mortal Enemy is a short classic that would make a great addition to the bookshelves of all Cather readers..

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Praise for the earlier edition: "Students of modern American literature have for some years turned to Fifteen Modern American Authors (1969) as an indispensable guide to significant scholarship and criticism about twentieth-century American writers. In its new form--Sixteenth Modern American Authors--it will continue to be indispensable. If it is not a desk-book for all Americanists, it is a book to be kept in the forefront of the bibliographical compartment of their brains."--American Studies.

My Mortal Enemy Willa Cather My Mortal Enemy is the eighth novel by American author Willa Cather. Myra and her husband Oswald return to their fictional hometown of Parthia, Illinois, to visit their relatives. Nellie and Aunt Lydia then leave to spend the Christmas holiday in New York City with them. They live on Madison Square. They dine with Ewan Gray, a friend who has an infatuation with another actress, Esther Sinclair. Oswald receives silver-buttons for his shirt from an old Western acquaintance, and asks Lydia to pretend she gave them to him to thwart his wife's jealousy. Later Myra and Nellie go to the opera; in a lodge they spot an erstwhile friend of Myra's, which makes her sad. Later they take a hansom around a park and chance upon a rich acquaintance of Myra's, which leads her to be scornful over her own poverty. They spend Christmas dinner with friends of the Henshawes - both artists and people of privilege. Later they spend New Year's Eve with artists again. A few days later Nellie witnesses the Henshawes argue; the husband takes her out to lunch. Soon after, she and her aunt are to return to Illinois. On the train, they are joined by Myra, who has argued with her husband again and is going to visit a friend in Pittsburgh for a change of scenery..

Though Cather (1837-1947) moved with her family to Nebraska when she was nine, her fiction throughout her life drew heavily from the people, places, and issues of her native Reconstruction South. Novice and veteran literature scholars from around the US examine such connections as racial language, sexual dynamics, and clothes and gender. The 17 essays were selected from a 1997 symposium in Frederick County, Virginia. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR.

"Sometimes, when I have watched the bright beginning of a love story, when I have seen a common feeling exalted into beauty by imagination, generosity, and the flaming courage of youth, I have heard again that strange complaint breathed by a dying woman into the stillness of night, like a confession of the soul: 'Why must I die like this, alone with my mortal enemy.'"Willa Cather's protagonist in My Mortal Enemy is Myra Henshawe, who as a young woman gave up a fortune to marry for love-a boldly romantic gesture that became a legend in her family. But this worldly, sarcastic, and perhaps even wicked woman may have been made for something greater than love.In her portrait of Myra and in her exquisitely nuanced depiction of her marriage, Cather shows the evolution of a human spirit as it comes to bridle against the constraints of ordinary happiness and seek an otherworldly fulfillment. My Mortal Enemy is a work whose drama and intensely moral imagination make it unforgettable..

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This is a work about the ways in which Willa Cather transforms secular space into sacred places in her fiction. She uses landscape not merely as a backdrop against which her characters struggle, but as a character in and of itself - a dynamic presence. For her, landscape is like consciousness, surrounding us always. In her novels, Cather describes the ways in which places allow people to understand their authentic selves. Cather's characters are intricately connected to the places they inhabit. Bartley Alexander cannot be fully understood apart from the kind of bridges he constructs, nor Marian Forrester apart from her bedroom; nor Godfrey St. Peter apart from his houses; nor Myra Henshawe apart from the cliff to which she travels in order to die; nor Father Latour apart from the cathedral he builds and the cave he visits; nor Cecile and Euclide Auclair apart from their home nestled into the rock of Quebec. Each of these characters makes a place of exile his or her own. Cather's artistic voice speaks for and through the landscapes she loved in life. As several critics have noted, Cather's mind works by opposition, furiously spinning doubles of character, experience, temperament, and place. Locating the scenes she imagines in particular places, she forces her readers to merge character and place in a way no other American writer has ever done. Willa Cather's fiction is also suffused with the notion of exile. Her characters, often banished from a native or authentic landscape, are restless pilgrims who long for home - a comforting space, a rest from the arduous journey. In order to manage the condition of exile, Cather's characters must transform secular spaces into sacred places. In these sacred places, existence suddenly makes sense: order is created from chaos, as the history of the earth and the history of the individual merge and are reconciled. Indeed, these sacred places, with an aura of resolution and rightness in their very air, bring peace. In this volume, Laura Winters presents and explains the metaphors of cantilever and suspension in Cather's first novel, Alexander's Bridge. She addresses Cather's parable of inspiration lost and found in A Lost Lady. She also deals with the pervasiveness of possession in Cather's fiction - particularly with how this pervasiveness is worked out in relation to landscape in The Professor's House. Cather's description of death in exile as presented in My Mortal Enemy and her play with movement and stasis in Death Comes for the Archbishop are also treated. Finally Winters discusses the condition of exile in Shadows on the Rock..

Drawing on letters, interviews, speeches, and reminiscences, looks at the life and career of the American novelist..

Willa Cather's Modernism challenges the assumption that Cather was an old-fashioned exponent of styles of fiction, demonstrating instead that Cather was clearly aware of the experimentation within the modernist movement. Illustrative chapters deal with three central novels: A Lost Lady, The Professor's House, and My Mortal Enemy..

I first met Myra Henshawe when I was fifteen, but I had known about her ever since I could remember anything at all. She and her runaway marriage were the theme of the most interesting, indeed the only interesting, stories that were told in our family, on holidays or at family dinners. My mother and aunts still heard from Myra Driscoll, as they called her, and Aunt Lydia occasionally went to New York to visit her. She had been the brilliant and attractive figure among the friends of their girlhood, and her life had been as exciting and varied as ours was monotonous.Though she had grown up in our town, Parthia, in southern Illinois, Myra Henshawe never, after her elopement, came back but once. It was in the year when I was finishing High School, and she must then have been a woman of forty-five. She came in the early autumn, with brief notice by telegraph. Her husband, who had a position in the New York offices of an Eastern railroad, was coming West on business, and they were going to stop over for two days in Parthia. He was to stay at the Parthian, as our new hotel was called, and Mrs. Henshawe would stay with Aunt Lydia.I was a favourite with my Aunt Lydia. She had three big sons, but no daughter, and she thought my mother scarcely appreciated me. She was always, therefore, giving me what she called "advantages," on the side. My mother and sister were asked to dinner at Aunt Lydia's on the night of the Henshawes' arrival, but she had whispered to me: "I want you to come in early, an hour or so before the others, and get acquainted with Myra."That evening I slipped quietly in at my aunt's front door, and while I was taking off my wraps in the hall I could see, at the far end of the parlour, a short, plump woman in a black velvet dress, seated upon the sofa and softly playing on Cousin Bert's guitar. She must have heard me, and, glancing up, she saw my reflection in a mirror; she put down the guitar, rose, and stood to await my approach. She stood markedly and pointedly still, with her shoulders back and her head lifted, as if to remind me that it was my business to get to her as quickly as possible and present myself as best I could. I was not accustomed to formality of any sort, but by her attitude she succeeded in conveying this idea to me.I hastened across the room with so much bewilderment and concern in my face that she gave a short, commiserating laugh as she held out to me her plump, charming little hand."Certainly this must be Lydia's dear Nellie, of whom I have heard so much! And you must be fifteen now, by my mournful arithmetic-am I right?"What a beautiful voice, bright and gay and carelessly kind-but she continued to hold her head up haughtily. She always did this on meeting people-partly, I think, because she was beginning to have a double chin and was sensitive about it. Her deep-set, flashing grey eyes seemed to be taking me in altogether-estimating me. For all that she was no taller than I, I felt quite overpowered by her-and stupid, hopelessly clumsy and stupid. Her black hair was done high on her head, à la Pompadour, and there were curious, zigzag, curly streaks of glistening white in it, which made it look like the fleece of a Persian goat or some animal that bore silky fur. I could not meet the playful curiosity of her eyes at all, so I fastened my gaze upon a necklace of carved amethysts she wore inside the square-cut neck of her dress. I suppose I stared, for she said suddenly: "Does this necklace annoy you? I'll take it off if it does."I was utterly speechless. I could feel my cheeks burning. Seeing that she had hurt me, she was sorry, threw her arm impulsively about me, drew me into the corner of the sofa and sat down beside me..