Since her death, Willa Cather seems to have been appointed an honorary lesbian. The honor may seem a dubious one, from several points of view, and the lesbianism is itself by no means as free from doubt as such things ought to be. Yet literary criticism and biography, unshackled by cheap doubt, march on. In a book by Jane Rule entitled Lesbian Images, Willa Cather’s life supplies a chapter. In a piece entitled “Nocturnal Turnings” in his book Music for Chameleons, Truman Capote describes encountering Willa Cather in 1942 at the New York Society Library on East Seventy-ninth Street: “Occasionally, I saw a woman there whose appearance rather mesmerized me—her eyes especially: blue, the pale brilliant cloudless blue of prairie skies. But even without this singular feature, her face was interesting—firm-jawed, handsome, a bit androgynous. Pepper-salt hair parted in the middle. Sixty-five, thereabouts. A lesbian? Well, yes.” And now, in Willa: The Life of Willa Cather,[1] an admiring biography by Phyllis C. Robinson, it is regularly asserted and then assumed that Willa Cather was indeed a lesbian. Is all this so? I wonder. While wondering, I feel rather like Groucho Marx in that movie in which, standing next to Margaret Dumont, Groucho, pointing his thumb at Miss Dumont, says: “I have to fight for her reputation—she won’t.” Except that in Willa Cather’s case it isn’t a matter of won’t but, being dead, can’t.

The critic T. K. Whipple once referred to Willa Cather’s literary