My Mortal Enemy (Annotated)

By Willa Cather

• This edition includes the following editor's introduction: Willa Cather, an analysis of the literature of a free and empowered woman

First published in 1926, “My Mortal Enemy” is the eighth novel by American author Willa Cather. Cather sketches a character study of a woman and a life not particularly well-lived. In this slim work, the story of an ill-considered marriage unfolds.

In “My Mortal Enemy,” Cather’s narrating alter ego, this time a young woman called Nellie, remembers a woman she first encountered as a teenager, Myra Henshawe. As a young woman, Myra 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ePembaBooks
• Release date: Nov 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9791222000299

Willa Cather

Willa Cather (1873-1947) was an award-winning American author. As she wrote her numerous novels, Cather worked as both an editor and a high school English teacher. She gained recognition for her novels about American frontier life, particularly her Great Plains trilogy. Most of her works, including the Great Plains Trilogy, were dedicated to her suspected lover, Isabelle McClung, who Cather herself claimed to have been the biggest advocate of her work. Cather is both a Pulitzer Prize winner and has received a gold medal from the Institute of Arts and Letters for her fiction.

Book preview

Willa Cather

My Mortal Enemy

Table of contents

Willa Cather, an analysis of the literature of a free and empowered woman

MY MORTAL ENEMY

Part 1

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Part 2

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Willa Cather, an analysis of the literature of a free and empowered woman

Willa Cather never fully identified herself as either a feminist or a lesbian. Cather portrayed the Nebraska wilderness, the pioneers in the US who came from lands where other languages are spoken and some did not survive the clash of cultures, like the grandfather of My Ántonia (1918), in a fluid prose full of vigour, cultured and precise.

Cather seems most comfortable when the protagonist of her novel is a man, although their names and positions in society have attracted much attention: thus, in stories such as Paul's Case (1905), she introduces us to a young dandy (described by Butler as an anti-hero worthy of Wilde) who must flee the provincial town where he is singled out by his classmates. Paul's Case would be included in 1920 in Youth and the Bright Medusa, a must-have collection of eight of her best short stories.

In One of Ours (1922) she steps into the shoes of a farmer who is eventually killed in the First World War, described with starkness and fatalism. In My Ántonia, the at first shy Paul must teach his idolised Antonia and her family of Czech and Scandinavian immigrants who are reluctant to lose the best of their ways.

In the novels featuring women, such as " My Mortal Enemy (1926), A Lost Lady (1923) or The Song of the Lark (1915) (where one notices more a closeness to the writing of the likes of Henry James) she chooses refinement and ambiguity over the poetic realism of her O Pioneers! (1913) or the sadness that pervades works where subtle homoeroticism and refined irony are mixed, such as The Professor's House (1925), or her atypical western, Death Comes for the Archbishop" (1927), where shepherds take their mission to evangelise the Aborigines to the extreme.

Cather does not seem to take an ideological stance, but almost all of her novels are a refusal to conform to gender roles, with the Claude of One of Ours shunning the typical school games and the protagonist of The Song of the Lark never allowing herself to be intimidated by her male rivals.

Mixing landscape description, lyricism, harshness, psychological introspection, romantic traits and a sort of gentle yet disenchanted look at the towns and cities she portrays, mixing cruelty and nostalgia, Cather has proved to be a pioneer in American literature willing not to submit to the dictates of gender and race in defining her characters. It can be said that the American writer was one of the most powerful voices of her time who in her own subtle and very personal way was able to capture the vindication of gender equality in her literature.

The Editor, P.C. 2022

MY MORTAL ENEMY

Willa Cather

Part 1

Chapter 1

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