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'A consummate artist'

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From: The Virginia Quarterly Review
Date: 20020401
Author:Silman, Roberta

'A CONSUMMATE ARTIST'

BY ROBERTA SILMAN

Willa Cather and The Politics of Criticism. By Joan Acocella. Nebraska. $20.00

Like her character, Mandy Ringer, in Sapphira and The Slave Girl, Willa Cather was "born interested." She wrote from many vantage points: autobiographical, historical, male, female. She understood that producing literature was not finding your subject, then repeating yourself endlessly, but approaching each new work with a fresh and inquiring eye. Thus she fit no type. Although Alfred Kazin called her "a consummate artist" in 1942, most critics, who were male, did not know ...

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