Landry met Thea in Germany when they were both students, and now he is back in New York, where Thea is performing. He is introduced very late in the novel, in Book VI his portrait (in the Oxford World’s Classics edition) comes on page 376 out of 415. I begin with the last of these little portraits, the portrait of Oliver Landry. When I quote a passage I will have to leave out most of what Cather has written, but I will indicate the number of sentences omitted. It’s hard to give any adequate sense of these the shortest is at least a half a page and the longer ones are a couple of pages. There are at least a dozen of these little portraits, and some of them are quite brilliant as character studies. Cather, however, seems to have imagined many of her secondary and tertiary characters in detail, and from time to time she stops the story to provide a little portrait of one of these characters. Most writers don’t spend a lot of time talking about their secondary and tertiary characters, who often enough are in the story just to move the props around, as it were.

By my count there are more than sixty characters named in the story. She is always at the center of the story, but there are also many secondary and tertiary characters as well.

The Song of the Lark tells the story of Thea Kronborg, from her early childhood in a small town in Colorado to her maturity as an opera star. Archie’s office, right at the beginning of the novel, and in later posts I will have more to say about her descriptions of places, but in this post I will talk about her little digressive portraits. In a previous post I discussed her description of Dr. It’s not her best book, in my opinion-I would rank One of Ours and Lucy Gayheart and A Lost Lady ahead of it-but as I reread it I find more and more to admire. The Song of the Lark was Cather’s third novel, published in 1915, after Alexander’s Bridge and O Pioneers! and before My Antonia. Recently I reread The Song of the Lark, and I thought I would write a few posts about it. She is very good at descriptions and what I call world-building. She is also an excellent composer of plots, where her technique is more evident. As a stylist she has been a big influence on me I have tried to achieve her seemingly effortless clarity, and I’ve come to realize how hard it is to write clearly.

Her style is mostly rather understated her use of language rarely calls attention to itself. She’s often considered a mid-Western realist, but that description really doesn’t begin to describe her writing. Willa Cather was born in Virginia in 1873, she grew up in Nebraska, but she lived most of her adult life in New York City, and she died in 1947.

The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather