Testimony:

Abstract

Spending time alone with her mother forced Cather into a new awareness of herself. She confessed to Dorothy Canfield that she seemed to have been a jumble of sensations and enthusiasms; not a real person at all. Until her mother fell ill, she had been so absorbed in her work, her friends, in listening to music, that she had given little thought to herself as a person; indeed, she had always deliberately avoided introspection and self-analysis. Although memory had played an important part in her life, she had never been concerned with herself in the past; that, she said, had always seemed to spoil things. But the last three years of her mother’s life, she wrote to Canfield, held her close to herself, and it was like being held against things too sad to live with. But in the process of self-confrontation, it seems to nie, Cather gained a new understanding of life; a kind of wisdom which makes her final books profoundly moving.

I have been running away from myself all my life… Willa Cather to Dorothy Canfield¹