Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Collection
Publication
Vintage (1976), Paperback, 231 pages
Description
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)
User reviews
LibraryThing member Schmerguls
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
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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. Show Less
LibraryThing member mikedraper
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
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.
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
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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.
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LibraryThing member lucybrown
while not at the level of O Pioneers or My Antonia, this is a well drawn study of love and loss.
LibraryThing member lucybrown
while not at the level of O Pioneers or My Antonia, this is a well drawn study of love and loss.
LibraryThing member lucybrown
while not at the level of O Pioneers or My Antonia, this is a well drawn study of love and loss.
LibraryThing member Rosareads
Willa Cather's writing is poetry in prose. Tender. Intimate. Understanding. Human.
LibraryThing member lauralkeet
Lucy Gayheart grew up on her family's Nebraska farm with her father and much older sister, who cared for Lucy after their mother passed away. At 18, everyone expects Lucy to marry local beau Harry Gordon, but she leaves home to study music in Chicago. Lucy finds a position as accompanist for
This was a beautifully written character study with real emotional depth that made me gasp more than once.
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Sebastian, a famous singer, which changes the course of her life. Sebastian expands Lucy's world view and even though he is much older, they fall in love. It seems as if their story can only get better, but Willa Cather has other plans. Circumstances force Lucy to return home, but she refuses to share details of her life in Chicago, even with her own family. Lucy had hoped to find friendship with Harry, but he has since married and keeps a respectable distance. Her self-imposed isolation begins to take its toll ... and I'll leave it at that.This was a beautifully written character study with real emotional depth that made me gasp more than once.
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LibraryThing member DrFuriosa
A moving, bittersweet story about the pain of unfulfilled love.
LibraryThing member Tytania
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
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."
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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."
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Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
1935
Physical description
231 p.; 7.2 inches
ISBN
0394717562 / 9780394717562