Sapphira and the slave girl
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Sapphira and the slave girl
（The Willa Cather scholarly edition）
University of Nebraska Press, 2009
Available at / 12 libraries
-
No Libraries matched.
- Remove all filters.
Note
Includes bibliographical references
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Willa Cather's twelfth and final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, is her most intense fictional engagement with political and personal conflict. Set in Cather's Virginia birthplace in 1856, the novel draws on family and local history and the escalating conflicts of the last years of slavery-conflicts in which Cather's family members were deeply involved, both as slave owners and as opponents of slavery. Cather, at five years old, appears as a character in an unprecedented first-person epilogue. Tapping her earliest memories, Cather powerfully and sparely renders a Virginia world that is simultaneously beautiful and, as she said, "terrible." The historical essay and explanatory notes explore the novel's grounding in family, local, and national history; show how southern cultures continually shaped Cather's life and work, culminating with this novel; and trace the progress of Cather's research and composition during years of grief and loss that she described as the worst of her life. More early drafts, including manuscript fragments, are available for Sapphira and the Slave Girl than for any other Cather novel, and the revealing textual essay draws on this rich resource to provide new insights into Cather's composition process.
Table of Contents
Preface
Sapphira and the Slave Girl
Acknowledgments
Historical Apparatus:
Historical Essay
Illustrations following page 000
Explanatory Notes
Textual Apparatus:
Textual Essay
Appendixes to the Textual Essay
Emendations
Notes on Emendations
Table of Rejected Substantives
Word Division
by "Nielsen BookData"