Cather admired Henry James's use of language and characterization.[174] While Cather enjoyed the novels of several women—including George Eliot,[175] the Brontës, and Jane Austen—she regarded most women writers with disdain, judging them overly sentimental.[29]: 110 One contemporary exception was Sarah Orne Jewett, who became Cather's friend and mentor.[H] Jewett advised Cather of several things: to use female narrators in her fiction (even though Cather preferred using male perspectives),[180][181] to write about her "own country" (O Pioneers! was dedicated in large part to Jewett),[182][183][184] and to write fiction that explicitly represented romantic attraction between women.[185][186][187][I] Cather was also influenced by the work of Katherine Mansfield,[98] praising in an essay Mansfield's ability "to throw a luminous streak out onto the shadowy realm of personal relationships."[189]
Cather's high regard for the immigrant families forging lives and enduring hardships on the Nebraska plains shaped much of her fiction. The Burlington Depot in Red Cloud brought in many strange and wonderful people to her small town. As a child, she visited immigrant families in her area and returned home in "the most unreasonable state of excitement," feeling that she "had got inside another person's skin."[22]: 169–170 After a trip to Red Cloud in 1916, Cather decided to write a novel based on the events in the life of her childhood friend Annie Sadilek Pavelka, a Bohemian girl who became the model for the title character in My Ántonia.[71][190][191] Cather was likewise fascinated by the French-Canadian pioneers from Quebec who had settled in the Red Cloud area while she was a girl.[192][193]
During a brief stopover in Quebec with Edith Lewis in 1927, Cather was inspired to write a novel set in that French-Canadian city. Lewis recalled: "From the first moment that she looked down from the windows of the [Chateau] Frontenac [Hotel] on the pointed roofs and Norman outlines of the town of Quebec, Willa Cather was not merely stirred and charmed—she was overwhelmed by the flood of memories, recognition, surmise it called up; by the sense of its extraordinary French character, isolated and kept intact through hundreds of years, as if by a miracle, on this great un-French continent."[29]: 414–15 Cather finished her novel Shadows on the Rock, a historical novel set in 17th-century Quebec, in 1931;[194] it was later included in Life magazine's list of the 100 outstanding books of 1924–1944.[195] The French influence is found in many other Cather works, including Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and her final, unfinished novel set in Avignon, Hard Punishments.[192]
