By Willa Cather

My Mortal Enemy is a story of seeking. When Myra Driscoll forsakes a fortune for love, eloping with the handsome and promising Oswald Hen^­shawe to New York, she certainly makes a name for herself in the records of family legend and lore. Yet the truth of the matter is not quite so exciting as the legend would have it: her life, like her marriage, is subject to disillusionment, disappointment, and the sobering dosages of reality. And in this, she is still seeking. From the bright lights and fast parties of Madison Square to the sand and surf of the Pacific coast, Myra Henshawe reckons with the kind of woman which life—and her own choices—have made her: a paradox of strength and weakness, generosity and tyranny, wit and wickedness, who hates life for its defeats and loves it for its absurdities. In this, she is a thoroughly “unmodern” Myra, in the words of the Catholic priest, Father Fay, who tends her in her old age and finds in her tempestuous character a mysterious likeness to one of his Church’s early saints.

The eighth of Cather’s dozen novels, first published in 1926, My Mortal Enemy is a finely worked chronicle of one woman’s contention with love—a contention in which the last enemy to be destroyed is death itself.

“Why must I die like this, alone with my mortal enemy?”

Willa Cather (1873–1947) was an American writer and woman of letters whose fiction grew out of the land under her feet. Her novels include O Pioneers! (1913), My Ántonia (1918), and My Mortal Enemy (1926). Her novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), has been acclaimed as “illustrative of the wonder and beauty of Catholic mys­teries,” and is available from Cluny.

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Paperback: 114pp.

ISBN: 978-1685954895