When she gets a job as cook for a neighboring family, the brother fights to stop her from becoming independent. He kills himself after one misfortune too many.Īfter their father’s death, Ántonia’s older brother Ambrosch becomes the head of the family and tries, in his own way, to protect her. Ántonia’s father cannot reconcile himself to this hard new life he has been a respected musician in Bohemia but is now reduced to extreme poverty. The Shimerdas have been tricked by a relative into paying too much for unfit, unusable land, animals and dwellings at first they live in not much more than a hole in the ground.

Unusually, a female author uses a male narrator: Jim Burden, ten years old at the start of the novel – Ántonia is two years older – to tell the story of his and other immigrant families, mostly newly arrived from Europe, settling in the virgin territory of Nebraska.

Nevertheless, this is a true coming of age story at the end it fast forwards to Ántonia being a middle-aged woman having had a large number of children, but not with the narrator: despite the title, she is not and never has been ‘his’ Ántonia. My Ántonia (1918) is the third of Willa Cather’s Midwestern pioneer novels (often referred to as the Prairie Trilogy) of early twentieth century frontier life which, despite their brevity, manage to encompass the epic sweep of the pioneering move to the West, seeming to hark back to an earlier era of rugged individualism.ĭespite the title, Ántonia (the Shimerda family have come from Bohemia all Czech names have the stress on the first syllable, hence the accent over the Á) is not the narrator nor even the central character she is always slightly off to one side and a little out of focus. This character analysis of Ántonia Shimerda, the heroine of My Ántonia by Willa Cather (1873-1947) is excerpted from Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-20th Century Woman’s Novel by Francis Booth, reprinted by permission.

Ántonia shimerda