“The Professor’s House” by Willa Cather

Book Review by Meredith McKinnie

“In great misfortunes, people want to be alone. They have a right to be. And the misfortunes that occur within one are the greatest. Surely the saddest thing in the world is falling out of love–if one has ever fallen in.” 

The professor St. Peter Godfrey is high off the fortune of writing a critically acclaimed book about Spanish history in North America. The years-long endeavor monopolized his work and while he is proud of his accomplishment, he is unsure what to devote his time to now. His financial windfall has afforded his family a new home, one luxurious and far beyond the meager salary of a professor. His grown daughters are recently married, and his wife, adjusting to her new lifestyle, is becoming less of the woman Godfrey fell in love with during his youth. The new house represents a new life, one Godfrey is unsure he wants to pursue. Instead, he isolates himself in the familiar space of the old house, lost in memories of a fading youth and his would-be-son-in-law and muse who died in the war.

Set in the Midwest, the novel ruminates on the past, idealized as being preferable to the uncertain, fast pace of the present. Godfrey looks up from his studies and sees his wife and daughters living on their own terms, a family for which he is no longer the proverbial center. Having shunned family life for career, he no longer recognizes the family he mentally left behind. Cather’s title character represents America, a country unsure of its future and still clinging to its past. Published in 1925, America is fresh off World War I, shaken but not broken, waiting for the dust to settle. 

The story is told in three parts: The Family; Tom Outlander’s Story; and The Professor. The first section provides the framework, the establishment of characters that make up the professor’s world. One daughter Rosamond has been left a potential fortune by Tom, her fiance who died in the war. Her new husband Louis represents the future, the shift of capitalism from physical labor to relentless dealmaking – assuring Tom’s invention is manufactured and profitable. Tom Outlander’s Story provides the backdrop for the man who would change all their lives, the wanderer who captures the hearts of all the Godfreys. The third section presents St. Peter’s reflection on his life, what was missed and what was allowed to simply pass by. 

Published the same year as Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, this novel is not the most critically acclaimed by Willa Cather, a regional writer who resented the classification. But her writing shows a budding America searching for identity and grasping at local places and discoveries for the answers of what it means to be an American. When we don’t have a shared history, to what extent will we strive to create one?

“The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one’s own.”