Rosemarie Bodenheimer is Professor Emerita at Boston College, where she specialized in Victorian and modern fiction. She is the author of The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans (1994), Knowing Dickens (2007), and Samuel Beckett (2022), part of Oxford University Press's "My Reading" series. She is the co-author, with Philip Davis, of In Dialogue with Dickens (2024). Philip Davis is Professor Emeritus at the University of Liverpool, where he was Director of the Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society (CRILS). He is the author of Bernard Malamud: A Writer's Life (2007), The Transferred Life of George Eliot (2017), and Reading for Life (2022), among many others.

These responses to and readings of Cather's work brought me back-powerfully, emotionally-to the time of my first discovery of Cather's fiction. I think the glow and joy I feel at reading this book is due, in large part, for its embrace of communicating a fresh encounter with a great writer. Rosemarie Bodenheimer and Philip Davis's thinking is charged with the thrill of discovery.

• IntroductionChapter 1: The Song of the LarkChapter 2: The Prairie NovelsChapter 3: ErosChapter 4: Middle AgeChapter 5: Passing OnChapter 6: Who Are You, Willa Cather?

Rosemarie Bodenheimer is Professor Emerita at Boston College, where she specialized in Victorian and modern fiction. She is the author of The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans (1994), Knowing Dickens (2007), and Samuel Beckett (2022), part of Oxford University Press's "My Reading" series. She is the co-author, with Philip Davis, of In Dialogue with Dickens (2024). Philip Davis is Professor Emeritus at the University of Liverpool, where he was Director of the Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society (CRILS). He is the author of Bernard Malamud: A Writer's Life (2007), The Transferred Life of George Eliot (2017), and Reading for Life (2022), among many others.

These responses to and readings of Cather's work brought me back-powerfully, emotionally-to the time of my first discovery of Cather's fiction. I think the glow and joy I feel at reading this book is due, in large part, for its embrace of communicating a fresh encounter with a great writer. Rosemarie Bodenheimer and Philip Davis's thinking is charged with the thrill of discovery.

• IntroductionChapter 1: The Song of the LarkChapter 2: The Prairie NovelsChapter 3: ErosChapter 4: Middle AgeChapter 5: Passing OnChapter 6: Who Are You, Willa Cather?