A Study Guide for Willa Cather's "The Song of the Lark"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Willa Cather's "The Song of the Lark," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Mar 14, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535843065

Book preview

12

The Song of the Lark

Willa Cather

1915

Introduction

Much of Willa Cather's most highly regarded fiction is set in the American West and in the Great Plains. Her third novel, The Song of the Lark, opens in Moonstone, Colorado, a setting integral to the early development of the novel's protagonist, Thea Kronborg. Thea's deeply emotional connections to places and to landscapes—first to Moonstone and later to the canyons of Arizona—shape her character. In The Song of the Lark, Cather traces the evolution of Thea as an artist.

Thea's journey begins in a small town in Colorado, where her talent as a pianist and her awareness of her sense of self are first revealed. In pursuit of a career in music, Thea travels first to Chicago and later to New York and Germany. Several relationships are revealed to be fundamental to Thea's artistic development and later professional success, but throughout the work, Cather emphasizes Thea's firm belief in her own unique sense of identity and artistic potential as she blossoms from a child into a young woman and accomplished opera singer. Scholars have noted that Cather's own childhood informs some of the early portions of the novel and that the author was inspired by the career of opera singer Olive Fremstad in writing the latter half of the work.

The Song of the Lark was originally published in 1915 and is available in a 2004 edition published by Dover.

Author Biography

Born on December 7, 1873, in Back Creek Valley, Virginia, Cather was named Wilella Cather, after an aunt. The year after Cather's birth, her parents, Charles and Mary Cather, moved their young family to Cather's grandfather's sheep farm in Willow Shade, Virginia. Two brothers and a sister were born in subsequent years. In 1882, Cather began calling herself Willa Love Cather, in honor of two men—an uncle who had died in the Civil War and the doctor who presided at her birth. In 1883, Cather and her family, including grandparents and cousins, moved to a farm in Nebraska. They remained on the family farm for a year, and then Cather's father moved his family to the prairie town of Red Cloud, Nebraska. Here, he opened a real estate office. Another brother was born in 1888.

In 1890, Cather graduated from Red Cloud High School and later that year moved to Lincoln to enroll in a University of Nebraska preparatory school, the Latin School. Another sister was born that same year. Cather entered the University of Nebraska in 1891 and, during her time there, regularly contributed essays and theater criticism to the Nebraska State Journal. After graduation in 1895, Cather secured a position as an associate editor for the Lincoln paper, the Courier. In 1896, Cather returned to Red Cloud for a short time before moving on to Pittsburgh, where she worked as the editor of Home Monthly. She began regularly publishing short