The first year is extremely difficult for the Shimerda family, without a proper house in the winter. Burden in her kitchen when she visits, learning more about cooking and housekeeping. Shimerda asking that Jim teach both her daughters to read English. The two are friends from the start, helped by Mrs. Ántonia, the elder daughter in the Shimerda family, is a few years older than young Jim. The two families are nearest neighbors to each other in a sparsely settled land. The Shimerda family paid for a homestead which proves to have no home on it, just a cave in the earth, and not much of the land broken for cultivation. The sleeping quarters and parlor are at ground level. The home has the dining room and kitchen downstairs, like a basement, with small windows at the top of the walls, an arrangement quite different from Jim's home in Virginia.

Jim lives with his grandparents in the home they have built, helping as he can with chores to ease the labor on the others. On the same train, headed to the same destination, is the Shimerda family from Bohemia. Jake, a farmhand from Virginia, rides with the 10-year-old boy. Orphaned Jim Burden rides the trains from Virginia to Black Hawk, Nebraska, where he will live with his paternal grandparents. The novel is divided into sections called Books: I The Shimerdas, II The Hired Girls, III Lena Lingard, IV The Pioneer Woman's Story, V Cuzak's Boys. Narration Ĭather chose a first-person narrator because she felt that novels depicting deep emotion, such as My Ántonia, were most effectively narrated by a character in the story. The name is pronounced as it would be in Czech. Jim thinks of her as his close friend, my Ántonia.

The story is told by her friend Jim, who arrives there at age ten to live with his grandparents. The title refers to Ántonia, a young woman immigrant to the western prairies of the US. Cather was praised for bringing the American West to life and making it personally interesting. This novel is considered Cather's first masterpiece. The first year in the very new place leaves strong impressions on both children, affecting them for life. The novel tells the stories of an orphaned boy from Virginia, Jim Burden, and the elder daughter in a family of Bohemian immigrants, Ántonia Shimerda, who are each brought as children to be pioneers in Nebraska towards the end of the 19th century. My Ántonia ( / ˈ æ n t ə n i ə/ AN-tə-nee-ə) is a novel published in 1918 by American writer Willa Cather, considered one of her best works.

My antonia book cover