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Lucy Gayheart (1935)

by Willa Cather

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5611742,275 (3.9)64
In this haunting 1935 novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of My Ántonia performs crystalline variations on the themes that preoccupy her greatest fiction: the impermanence of innocence, the opposition between prairie and city, provincial American values and world culture, and the grandeur, elation, and heartache that await a gifted young woman who leaves her small Nebraska town to pursue a life in art. At the age of eighteen, Lucy Gayheart heads for Chicago to study music. She is beautiful and impressionable and ardent, and these qualities attract the attention of Clement Sebastian, an aging but charismatic singer who exercises all the tragic, sinister fascination of a man who has renounced life only to turn back to seize it one last time. Out of their doomed love affair--and Lucy's fatal estrangement from her origins--Willa Cather creates a novel that is as achingly lovely as a Schubert sonata.… (more)
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    Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín (pacocillero)
    pacocillero: Aunque el estilo es muy distinto las historias convergen en que son las dos mujeres que emigran buscando un cambio en sus vidas.
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English (16)  Spanish (1)  All languages (17)
Showing 1-5 of 16 (next | show all)
A little tragedy about a gay-hearted young woman in the early 20th century Great Plains. It really brought a feel for the times and the location. I liked it as a story; it kept me reading; though sometimes it risked getting a little too talky-feely. And I wish things could have gone better for Lucy.

Part of it reminded me of THE AWAKENING by Kate Chopin, particularly this: "Since then she had changed so much in her thoughts, in her ways, even in her looks, that she might wonder she knew herself - except that the changes were all in the direction of becoming more and more herself."

Why she had to lie to her old beau, implying something had happened that hadn't - and really why she couldn't marry him in the first place: "She had tried to tell him the truth about a feeling; but a feeling meant nothing to him, he had to be clubbed by a situation." I love that, "clubbed by a situation." ( )
  Tytania | Feb 10, 2024 |
Willa Cather's "My Antonia" is one of my favorite pieces of literature by a female writer, so I occasionally pick up some of her other works. This one reminded me a lot of Edith Wharton's "Ethan Frome," with its wistful main character and doomed romance. And I sympathized with Lucy's sister Pauline when she described the "parlour cat and the kitchen cat." ( )
1 vote resoundingjoy | Jan 1, 2021 |
A moving, bittersweet story about the pain of unfulfilled love. ( )
  DrFuriosa | Dec 4, 2020 |
50. Lucy Gayheart by Willa Cather
published: 1935
format: 195-page Vintage Classic paperback
acquired: June
read: Sep 8 – Oct 1
time reading: 5 hr 2 min, 1.6 min/page
rating: 4½
locations: early 20th century Nebraska and Chicago
about the author born near Winchester, VA, later raised in Red Cloud, NE. December 7, 1873 – April 24, 1947

I'm running out of Cathers. I was worried based the previous book, [Shadows on the Rock] and the contemporary criticism of conservativism in her later novels that she was running low at the end. Then here she immediately generates a wonderful character in Lucy Gayheart to open this novel. Lucy‘s vitality comes off the page in this prose. Her aura, her existence - it‘s beautiful and attractive. Maybe sexy. And there is a Chekhov element as we open not with Lucy exactly, but with memories and with the failure of photographs to capture her living energy, her “gentle glow”, a “bird flying home”. Cather has cast her magic.

Fate seems to play a role. Cather lays out this way:

In the darkening sky she had seen the first star come out; it brought her heart into her throat. That point of silver light spoke to her like a signal, released another kind of life and feeling which did not belong here. It overpowered her. With a mere thought she had reached that star and it had answered, recognition had flashed between. Something knew then, in the unknowing waste: something had always known, forever! That joy of saluting what is far above one was an eternal thing, not merely something that had happened to her in ignorance and her foolish heart.

The flash of understanding lasted but a moment. Then everything was confused again. Lucy shut her eyes and leaned on Harry‘s shoulder to escape from what she had gone so far to snatch. It was too bright and too sharp. It hurt, and made one feel small and lost.


The novel takes us from small town Nebraska pettiness to a mix of Chicago's anonymity and its high music culture in earlies days of the 20th century. I really enjoyed spending time with Lucy and worried about the ominous implications of fate. It's tightly knit, clean novel that offers its unique little literary spark, even if it revisits some well tread Cather themes.

2020
https://www.librarything.com/topic/322920#7285509 ( )
  dchaikin | Oct 11, 2020 |
this isn't actually bad or anything, i just don't really see the point of it. the last bit picked it up for me - the sentiment and the writing was strongest in that part; so i almost gave it 2 stars since it ended on a higher note. but, while as a whole it's not at all bad, i just don't see much to it. i wasn't made to care about the characters, the situation, the place - as well drawn as they were. the writing was good but unlike others of hers i've read, it was lacking any emotional impact.

maybe it's the kind of story that doesn't appeal to me these days, because it was well done for what it was; I just wasn't into it. ( )
  overlycriticalelisa | Nov 21, 2019 |
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In Harverford on the Platte the townspeople still talk of Lucy Gayheart.
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In this haunting 1935 novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of My Ántonia performs crystalline variations on the themes that preoccupy her greatest fiction: the impermanence of innocence, the opposition between prairie and city, provincial American values and world culture, and the grandeur, elation, and heartache that await a gifted young woman who leaves her small Nebraska town to pursue a life in art. At the age of eighteen, Lucy Gayheart heads for Chicago to study music. She is beautiful and impressionable and ardent, and these qualities attract the attention of Clement Sebastian, an aging but charismatic singer who exercises all the tragic, sinister fascination of a man who has renounced life only to turn back to seize it one last time. Out of their doomed love affair--and Lucy's fatal estrangement from her origins--Willa Cather creates a novel that is as achingly lovely as a Schubert sonata.

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Lucy Gayheart is a talented pianist, a woman of grace and vitality with "that singular brightness of young beauty". It is 1901 and she is studying music in the magical smoky city of Chicago, returning occasionally to provincial Haverford, the town of her birth. She meets and falls in love with a middle-aged opera singer, a man whose influence will change the course of her life forever. First published in 1935, this resonant novel is much more than a simple love story. For, rejecting the commonplaces of small-town life, Lucy seeks the splendour of an "invisible, inviolable world" glimpsed through her music. In contrasting the possibilities of each, Willa Cather has produced a novel of clarity and quiet distinction.
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