TT: Almanac

“To account for Cather’s fiction by reading it as an encoding of covert, even guilty, sexuality, is, I think, patronizing and narrow. It assumes that the work is written only in order to express homosexual feeling in disguise; it makes her out to be a coward (which was certainly not one of her failings); and it assumes that ‘openness’ would have been preferable. If the argument is that ‘Cather never dealt adequately with her homosexuality in her fiction,’ that My Ántonia is ‘a betrayal of female independence and female sexuality,’ and that The Professor’s House and Death Comes for the Archbishop retreat into ‘a world dominated by patriarchy,’ then Cather is diminished by being enlisted to a cause. She was a writer who worked, at her best, through indirection, suppression, and suggestion, and through a refusal to be enlisted.”
Hermione Lee, Willa Cather: Double Lives