Lucy Gayheart

By Willa Cather

In this haunting 1935 novel, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of My Ántonia performs crystalline variations on the themes that preoccupy her greatest fiction: the impermanence of innocence, the opposition between prairie and city, provincial American values and world culture, and the grandeur, elation, and heartache that await a gifted young woman who leaves her small Nebraska town to pursue a life in art.

At the age of eighteen, Lucy Gayheart heads for Chicago to study music. She is beautiful and impressionable and ardent, and these qualities attract the attention of Clement Sebastian, an aging but charismatic singer who exercises all the tragic, sinister fascination of a man who has renounced life only to turn back to seize it one last time. Out of their doomed love affair—and Lucy's fatal estrangement from her origins—Willa Cather creates a novel that is as achingly lovely as a Schubert sonata.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Aug 24, 2011
• ISBN: 9780307805232

Willa Cather

A prolific, confessedly compulsive poet and playright, Maureen Duffy published her first novel, ‘That’s How It Was’, in 1962. Since then she has written many novels including ‘Love Child, Gor Saga, Londoners’ and most recently, ‘Illuminations’, (1991) and ‘Ocean’s Razor ‘ (1993).

Reviews for Lucy Gayheart

[rosareads · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Willa Cather's writing is poetry in prose. Tender. Intimate. Understanding. Human.

[lauralkeet · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Lucy Gayheart grew up on her family's Nebraska farm with her father and much older sister, who cared for Lucy after their mother passed away. At 18, everyone expects Lucy to marry local beau Harry Gordon, but she leaves home to study music in Chicago. Lucy finds a position as accompanist for Sebastian, a famous singer, which changes the course of her life. Sebastian expands Lucy's world view and even though he is much older, they fall in love. It seems as if their story can only get better, but Willa Cather has other plans. Circumstances force Lucy to return home, but she refuses to share details of her life in Chicago, even with her own family. Lucy had hoped to find friendship with Harry, but he has since married and keeps a respectable distance. Her self-imposed isolation begins to take its toll ... and I'll leave it at that.This was a beautifully written character study with real emotional depth that made me gasp more than once.

[rainpebble_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Lucy Gayheart by Willa Cather; VMC, ROOT; (5*)This slender novel filled me with nostalgia and a renewed love for the small town life that I have always lived. This is, hands down, Willa Cather at her best. It is the story of Lucy Gayheart, a young pianist who leaves small town, Nebraska and travels to Chicago to study music. She becomes a rehearsal pianist for an opera singer. The book follows Lucy's life, her loves and the tragedies that affect her life and that of those around her. It is a haunting story of youth and regrets.As in some of Cather's other works there is a contrast between small town Nebraska and big city Chicago with each having its virtues and its flaws. As always Cather's characters are well rounded and her locale and character descriptions are vividly painted. The way her characters observe and interact with each other is a wonder to read. This contains some of the loveliest writing I've come across for a while. Cather writes with simplicity yet with such beauty. There is just so very much within her words. Every page contains some of the most beautiful prose you'll ever read. Though hardly well acclaimed, this dark novel is a treasure. It ends with such a haunting epilogue.I think that Willa Cather was somehow an instinctively great writer. One would perhaps expect this little book to be light reading but I did not find it so. Tragedy is key in this novel because it is the insight that gets conveyed after the fact that gives this work it's depth.

[lucybrown_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

while not at the level of O Pioneers or My Antonia, this is a well drawn study of love and loss.

[drfuriosa · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A moving, bittersweet story about the pain of unfulfilled love.

[mikedraper · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Lucy Gayheart grows up in the small town of Haverford in the midwest. She becomes a fixture in the town, with her happy personality and outgoing nature.When she goes off to Chicago to study music, the town and her family misses her. She becomes infatuated with a singer and becomes his accompanist.She has friends from home and sees a number of them periodically but then something surprising happens with a man she had been seeing.It is almost as if this sad thing unjustly happened to a wonderful woman and it is easy to picture this being made into a film.

[schmerguls · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

1080 Lucy Gayheart, by Willa Cather (read 20 Sep 1970) As I read this book I kept being not too impressed. I thought it was too like Cather's The Song of the Lark. But it is not like it at all. True, it involves a Midwestern girl who goes to Chicago to study piano, but this story is not about achievement, but about life. [SPOILER] Lucy's married (to another) lover is drowned, and Lucy returns to Haverford, Neb. and drowns in the Platte. It is at this point the book hits high drama, and the last part is touched by perfection. The big deal is Harry Gordon snubbing her in Haverford--even I thought him a cad. Of course Lucy bothered me too. She is not a wholly-admirable heroine--not like Cecile in Shadows on the Rock.