Although Cather began her writing career as a journalist, she made a distinction between journalism, which she saw as being primarily informative, and literature, which she saw as an art form.[196]: 27 Cather's work is often marked by—and criticized for[197]—its nostalgic tone[98][198][199] and themes drawn from memories of her early years on the American plains.[200][201] Consequently, a sense of place is integral to her work: notions of land,[202] the frontier,[J] pioneering and relationships with western landscapes are recurrent.[204][205][206] Even when her heroines were placed in an urban environment, the influence of place was critical, and the way that power was displayed through room layout and furniture is evident in her novels like My Mortal Enemy.[207] Though she hardly confined herself to writing exclusively about the Midwest, Cather is virtually inseparable from the Midwestern identity that she actively cultivated (even though she was not a "native" Midwesterner).[208] While Cather is said to have significantly altered her literary approach in each of her novels,[209][210] this stance is not universal; some critics have charged Cather with being out of touch with her times and failing to use more experimental techniques in her writing, such as stream of consciousness.[196]: 36 [211][212] At the same time, others have sought to place Cather alongside modernists by either pointing to the extreme effects of her apparently simple Romanticism[213] or acknowledging her own "middle ground":
She had formed and matured her ideas on art before she wrote a novel. She had no more reason to follow Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, whose work she respected, than they did to follow her. Her style solves the problems in which she was interested. She wanted to stand midway between the journalists whose omniscient objectivity accumulate more fact than any character could notice and the psychological novelist whose use of subjective point of view stories distorts objective reality. She developed her theory on a middle ground, selecting facts from experience on the basis of feeling and then presenting the experience in a lucid, objective style.[214]
The English novelist A. S. Byatt has written that with each work Cather reinvented the novel form to investigate the changes in the human condition over time.[215] Particularly in her frontier novels, Cather wrote of both the beauty and terror of life.[216] Like the exiled characters of Henry James, an author who had a significant influence on the author,[217] most of Cather's major characters live as exiled immigrants,[216] identifying with the immigrants' "sense of homelessness and exile" following her own feelings of exile living on the frontier. It is through their engagement with their environment that they gain their community.[218] Susan J. Rosowski wrote that Cather was perhaps the first to grant immigrants a respectable position in American literature.[219]
