Fireside Reading with Christopher Benfey: My Ántonia, An Invitation

We’re so pleased to announce the next Book Post virtual reading group, for which we had a wonderful initiation with Mona Simpson and Middlemarch last spring. To help us while away the dark and lonely months, Chris Benfey will join us in February to read Willa Cather’s My Ántonia! As previously we can offer the book at a discount with our bookselling partner, Square Books, on the occasion of our reading group. Thanks Square!

Chris has written for Book Post on subjects as eclectic as hunting, kites, Whitman, election days of yore, and the Austrian fabulist Adalbert Stifter. He’s a for-real scholar with books on Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Stephen Crane, and Kipling in America, as well as a poet who’s written a family memoir about pottery, bohemia, and American wandering (plus the Gilded Age’s infatuation with Old Japan and introductions to books on tea and Lafcadio Hearne).

He thought My Ántonia would be just the right book for us to get us through February, and indeed in our book group poll last summer you all opted for a novel out of our literary past, plus, it’s way shorter than Middlemarch, for those who were too busy last time for such a big bite. So, without further ado, Chris Benfey.

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Friends:

I am very much looking forward to reading Willa Cather’s My Ántonia with all of you!

This gorgeous novel, which celebrated its 100^th birthday in 2018, is poetically conceived and deftly constructed, with lyrical description and subtle symbolism. It’s also fun to read!

My Ántonia is probably the most recognizable among Cather’s dozen novels; it used to be a standard work in American high schools and colleges. The novel has many timely themes that have haunted American literature over the years: immigration; ethnic and racial difference; gender and sexual definition; abuse of women; social instability and despair. It has been recommended, at least twice, by New York Times columnists for the insights it might provide into our current dilemmas. And it’s one of those novels that we may think we know even if it’s been a very long time since we last read it. (Believe me, it will surprise you when you take a fresh look.)  

I was tempted by some of Cather’s other novels. A Lost Lady is shorter, more tightly constructed, easier; The Professor's House is longer, bizarrely constructed, male-centered, more challenging. The serene Death Comes for the Archbishop is perhaps a bit remote and too overtly Christian as an introduction to Cather for modern readers. Any one of these books would have kept us busy. But I’ve made my choice.

So, let’s go with My Ántonia! Can’t wait!

Chris Benfey

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Our first installment will go out to Book Post Fireside Reading subscribers on Sunday, February 4. Meet us here for conversation in the comments!

Subsequent installments:
February 11: Book One, Chapters 8-14
February 18: Book Two
February 25: Books Three and Four
And we'll wrap it up virtually together at the end to wrap things up at a date TBA.

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Let us know if you have questions and we so look forward to seeing you here in the comments!

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Images: Willa Cather with a fellow passenger aboard the SS Noordland on her way to Europe, June 1902, from her European scrapbook. Philip L. and Helen Cather Southwick Collection, Archives & Special Collections, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries. Camp Fire (detail), Winslow Homer, Metropolitan Museum of Art