Shadows on the Rock

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Shadows on the Rock

Title:

Shadows on the Rock

Author:

Cather, Willa

Subject:

Literature

Historical Fiction

Classic Literature

Fiction

Description:

Willa Cather's novel of seventeenth-century Quebec is a luminous evocation of North American origins, and of the men and women who struggled to adapt to a new world even as they clung to the artifacts and manners of one they left behind.In 1697, Quebec is an island of French civilization perched on a bare gray rock amid a wilderness of trackless forests. For many of its settlers, Quebec is a place of exile, so remote that an entire winter passes without a word from home. But to twelve-year-old Cécile Auclair, the rock is home, where even the formidable Governor Frontenac entertains children in his palace and beavers lie beside the lambs in a Christmas créche. As Cather follows this devout and resourceful child over the course of a year, she re-creates the continent as it must have appeared to its first European inhabitants. And she gives us a spellbinding work of historical fiction in which great events occur first as rumors and then as legends—and in which even the most intimate domestic scenes are suffused with a sense of wonder.

Publisher:

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Vintage

Date:

2011/08/24

Digital Format:

Open in browser

Download EPUB file

Kindle

Language:

English

Summary

Willa Cather's novel of seventeenth-century Quebec is a luminous evocation of North American origins, and of the men and women who struggled to adapt to a new world even as they clung to the artifacts and manners of one they left behind.

In 1697, Quebec is an island of French civilization perched on a bare gray rock amid a wilderness of trackless forests. For many of its settlers, Quebec is a place of exile, so remote that an entire winter passes without a word from home. But to twelve-year-old Cécile Auclair, the rock is home, where even the formidable Governor Frontenac entertains children in his palace and beavers lie beside the lambs in a Christmas créche. As Cather follows this devout and resourceful child over the course of a year, she re-creates the continent as it must have appeared to its first European inhabitants. And she gives us a spellbinding work of historical fiction in which great events occur first as rumors and then as legends--and in which even the most intimate domestic scenes are suffused with a sense of wonder.

Author Notes

Willa Siebert Cather was born in 1873 in the home of her maternal grandmother in western Virginia. Although she had been named Willela, her family always called her "Willa." Upon graduating from the University of Nebraska in 1895, Cather moved to Pittsburgh where she worked as a journalist and teacher while beginning her writing career.

In 1906, Cather moved to New York to become a leading magazine editor at McClure's Magazine before turning to writing full-time. She continued her education, receiving her doctorate of letters from the University of Nebraska in 1917, and honorary degrees from the University of Michigan, the University of California, Columbia, Yale, and Princeton.

Cather wrote poetry, short stories, essays, and novels, winning awards including the Pulitzer Prize for her novel, One of Ours, about a Nebraska farm boy during World War I. She also wrote The Professor's House, My Antonia, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and Lucy Gayheart. Some of Cather's novels were made into movies, the most well-known being A Lost Lady, starring Barbara Stanwyck.

In 1961, Willa Cather was the first woman ever voted into the Nebraska Hall of Fame. She was also inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners in Oklahoma in 1974, and the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca, New York in 1988.

Cather died on April 24, 1947, of a cerebral hemorrhage, in her Madison Avenue, New York home, where she had lived for many years.

(Bowker Author Biography)

Reviews (2)

Choice Review

In the cameo worlds of Willa Cather's fiction, one always senses the looming presence of a larger world just at the perimeter. The larger world in Shadows on the Rock is France, and this new scholarly edition of the novel depicts how French history and customs shaped life in the intimate circle of colonial Quebec. In a letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Cather herself remarked that "every detail in the lives of her characters in this novel had been taken from old books and letters." The edition's "Historical Apparatus" upholds Cather's claim. It includes a historical essay; an unused fragment from the original manuscript about Cecile, the novel's main character; photographs of historical figures who appeared in the book and of maps, letters, and architecture in France and Quebec pertinent to the novel; and explanatory notes on the novel itself. The "Textual Apparatus" section--which includes necessary and valuable information about word division, emendations, and a table of rejected substantives--will be valuable to more advanced readers and students of the text. Devotees of this novelistic treasure almost lost in Cather's vast oeuvre will surely herald Link's new scholarly edition. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. J. A. Dompkowski Canisius College

Library Journal Review

Cather's historical novel, set in Quebec, gets the scholarly treatment. In addition to a corrected text, this edition sports photos and illustrations, textual notes, and historical essays. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Summary

Summary

Author Notes

Reviews (2)

Choice Review

Library Journal Review

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