In some ways My Ántonia is a perfect illustration of Virginia Woolfs insight that all writers must be androgynous, willing and able to express both the male and the female. With Jim and Ántonia, Cather is "practicing fiction" at the highest level, inventing characters who are like her and not like her, who are and are not like their real-life models.

The bold curiosity and independent spirit that did not gain Cather approval in Red Cloud society is of course necessary for an artist, and it is likely that her scorn for the popular art of what she called "adjective and sentimentality" made Willa Cather unpopular with peers and elders alike. The frustrations of Cather's teenage years in Red Cloud seem to have found release in the columns she wrote for the Nebraska State Journal from 1893 to 1896, when she was a student at the University of Nebraska. An 1894 piece all but scorches the page: "The Bohemians make large pretensions, it's a part of their business. But they have great standards, that saves them....In Philistia there are no standards and no gods. Each house has its own little new improved portable idol and could never be convinced that it was not just as good as any other idol. Here the great standards of art avail nothing."

In an 1895 essay entitled "The Demands of Art" Cather makes a revealing statement about the vulnerability of the artist. "When one comes to write," she says, "all that you have been taught leaves you, all that you have stolen lies discovered. You are then a translator, without a lexicon, without notes.... You have then to give voice to the hearts of men, and you can do it only so far as you have known them, loved them. It is a solemn and terrible thing to write a novel." Cather was then seventeen years away from publishing her first novel; she would spend ten years in Pittsburgh teaching high school and working as a journalist before moving to New York. There she had more hack work ahead of her at McClure's before the advice of another woman writer, Sarah Orne Jewett, would take hold in her. "You must find a quiet place," Jewett wrote Cather in 1908. "You must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that."

Louise Bogan puts Willa Cather's achievement in perspective when she writes approvingly that while Cather's first novel, Alexander's Bridge, opens in Boston, her second, O Pioneers!, begins with a scene of a high gale in Nebraska. "For Miss Cather, the wind was at last blowing in the right direction," Bogan concludes. "From then on ... she remembered Nebraska." A large part of that remembering for Cather meant calling forth in herself that love she had spoken of in her youthful manifesto on the demands of writing, but it took her some time to shed her self-consciousness and to develop the artistic mastery that H. L. Mencken found so striking in My Ántonia.

Even more than in My Ántonia, the land itself is the main character of O Pioneers!, but in Cather's second Nebraska novel, The Song of the Lark, it figures hardly at all; instead, Cather takes a hard look at what it takes for a woman artist to emerge from the constrictions of small-town society. Its heroine, the ambitious and resourceful Thea Kronborg, pursues her career as a singer despite a disapproving family and men who underestimate her. Her triumph is singing at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

In My Ántonia, as Cather returns to rural Nebraska, she contrasts it not only with local small-town society, but with the larger world that the railroad reaches. The heroic vision of the first generation of Nebraska homesteaders that marks O Pioneers! has been tempered by Cather's wariness of the "progress" that came barreling along with the advent of the twentieth century. A sense of loss permeates the novel, the sense that, as Cather wrote in 1923, in Nebraska, "the splendid story of the pioneers is finished, and ... no new story worthy to take its place has yet begun."

The epigraph from Virgil that Jim Burden employs as a motto for recounting his childhood friendship with Ántonia in the Nebraska countryside—"Optima dies ... prima fugit" (The best days are the first to flee)—epitomizes the elegiac tone of the novel, and helps to explain the way the book unfolds. Episodic rather than plot-driven, My Ántonia is a continual revelation of stories that linger in the memory. In many ways the novel is a perfect evocation of childhood. The task for Jim Burden in recounting the past is not to dwell in it, but to use it to celebrate the present, however reluctantly. The reader comes to understand that both Jim and Ántonia have done well not to triumph over circumstance but to keep both memory and hope alive within its bounds.

The task for Cather, as novelist, is to describe the past in such a way that it is truly evoked, with a minimum of nostalgia or sentimentality. This she does in part by making indelible the vigor, the very voice of Ántonia Shimerda; we see Ántonia running barefoot in her garden, gripping plough handles behind a team of horses, gathering her children to her side.