Reviewed by: Cather among the Moderns by Janis P. Stout Kari A. Ronning STOUT, JANIS P. Cather among the Moderns. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2019. 280 pp. $44.95 cloth; $44.95 ebook. As the editor of the Calendar of the Letters of Willa Cather (2002), co-editor (with Andrew Jewell) of the Selected Letters of Willa Cather (2013), and founding co-editor of the online Complete Letters of Willa Cather, Janis Stout is deeply familiar with Cather’s life and with the thought processes she committed to paper. Stout is also well versed in the historical and cultural background of Cather’s life in the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century; she understands the nuances of societal mores and expectations as well as the relationships among the people with whom Cather associated. As Stout says, she aims to position Cather “against a crowded backdrop of her contemporaries...[who] were recognized as moderns and modernists” (xii). Many critics have come around to the idea that Cather was not so traditionalist as the lucidity of her prose might suggest, and a number have explored particular ways in which Cather interacted with the modernist art of her time. Stout, however, shows the interplay of Cather and many of her works with a much wider range of literary, artistic, [End Page 612] and cultural ideas and movements; this book will spark further inquiries not only into Cather’s work but into the modernism of many other writers and their texts. Throughout the book, the narrative of Cather’s life is balanced with historical and critical narratives. Stout begins with Cather’s life as she set out from Nebraska to take the editorship of a magazine in Pittsburgh—the epitome of the “New Woman: single, white [Stout is well aware of the privilege Cather had], well-educated, intent on career achievement, unconventional” (1). The young Cather rode bicycles, smoked cigarettes (as she apparently did the rest of her life), mixed (and presumably drank) cocktails, and went about unchaperoned. When she settled in New York City, she and her partner Edith Lewis chose to stay in the artistic ferment that was Greenwich Village. Stout has the geography down as well as the history: she points out that the Triangle Shirtwaist factory was near Washington Square, in the Village, where Cather lived. Her seldom discussed story, “Behind the Singer Tower” (1912), as Stout shows, draws on details of the tragic fire. Another chapter addresses Cather’s crushes, friendships, and relationships with a wide variety of women in New York and the Southwest, as well as her long-term partnership with editor and advertising copywriter Edith Lewis. However, it is surprising how little Stout mentions Cather’s long intimacy with Isabelle McClung Hambourg, who appears primarily as a person with whom Cather occasionally stayed and occasionally travelled. Stout gives more space to a few women whom she cannot show that Cather even met than to a woman whom Cather called her “best and soundest critic” (Selected Letters 562). In Cather’s life, as in her writing, especially of women characters like Alexandra, Thea, and Ántonia, Cather quietly challenged the expected or traditional roles and literary conventions. That she did so quietly, Stout shows throughout the book, is one of the reasons her modernism and experimentalism have been so often overlooked. Stout then argues for the central place of Cather’s novel of World War I, One of Ours, in her work. It was published in 1922, the year, as Cather later said, that “the world broke in two” (Not Under Forty v). The sense of brokenness—with the past, with authority, with artistic forms and traditions—central to modernism is implicit in Cather’s novel and casts its shadows on her later works. The central character, Claude, who has been searching for a meaning for his life, joins up in the war fervor and is killed in battle; his mother, observing the postwar world, is thankful that Claude did not live to see it. The critics who assumed that Claude’s eagerness for war was Cather’s also assumed that because she was a woman she could not write truly about the...