The Song of the Lark

This, the most autobiographical of Cather's novels, is the moving story of a courageous young woman determined to forge her own destiny.Born into obscurity in a small desert town of the American West, Thea escapes her humble origins - and a doomed love affair - through the power of her extraordinary voice. But with artistic recognition comes the realisation of the price it has for a woman: the greater her success in the musical world, the paler and more insignificant her personal life seems. The result is a strange reversal of the fate of Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray.

Born in 1873 to a family who had farmed in Virginia for generations, Willa Cather moved to her father's new ranch in Nebraska when she was eight. Her evocations of the pioneering West have established her as one of America's foremost writers. Cather died in New York in 1947.