Lucy Gayheart (original 1935; edition 1996)

Lucy Gayheart grows up in the small town of Haverford in the midwest. She becomes a fixture in the town, with her happy personality and outgoing nature.

When she goes off to Chicago to study music, the town and her family misses her. She becomes infatuated with a singer and becomes his accompanist.

She has friends from home and sees a number of them periodically but then something surprising happens with a man she had been seeing.

It is almost as if this sad thing unjustly happened to a wonderful woman and it is easy to picture this being made into a film. ( )

This is an elegantly-written book, although I sensed almost from the start that Lucy's story would end unhappily. I kept hoping that she would find happiness, and I really, really wanted to be proved wrong with a conventionally happy ending.

Lucy Gayheart is a fascinating, beautiful young woman, and a talented pianist. At the age of eighteen she leaves her small town home to study in Chicago. When she has the opportunity to work as an accompanist for ageing but charismatic - and married - singer Clement Sebastian, she is fascinated by him and quickly falls in love. Harry Gordon, her friend and suitor from her home town of Haverford arrives. He suggests - most unromantically - that they should get married. Lucy feels unable to do so, torn between Sebastian and what he represents (vibrant city life, artistic success) and her own small town, where she grew up and where her roots are.

The section of the novel dealing with Lucy's return to Haverford is almost painful to read. Even when she is feeling positive and on the side of life, one can't help feeling that her happiness is brittle and cannot last. Beautifully written though the book is, and courageous though Lucy is in many ways, it's rather a bleak story. It does carry a big emotional charge, though, and I derived as much pleasure from the construction of the story as I did from the novel itself. [November 2007] ( )

1080 Lucy Gayheart, by Willa Cather (read 20 Sep 1970) As I read this book I kept being not too impressed. I thought it was too like Cather's The Song of the Lark. But it is not like it at all. True, it involves a Midwestern girl who goes to Chicago to study piano, but this story is not about achievement, but about life. [SPOILER] Lucy's married (to another) lover is drowned, and Lucy returns to Haverford, Neb. and drowns in the Platte. It is at this point the book hits high drama, and the last part is touched by perfection. The big deal is Harry Gordon snubbing her in Haverford--even I thought him a cad. Of course Lucy bothered me too. She is not a wholly-admirable heroine--not like Cecile in Shadows on the Rock. ( )