A landmark achievement. For the first time a Cather biography follows in detail the transformation of the girl, talented and wildly unsuited to the assigned female destiny, into a functioning, autonomous adult...Scholarly, open-minded, tireless, [O'Brien] explores all the avenues her own investigations and other theorists have opened for her, and thus provides a model for female biography...Without anger or defensiveness [O'Brien] has...written a woman artist's life, seldom if ever re-created so imaginatively and, therefore, so accurately.
-- Carolyn Heilbrun New York Times Book Review
What distinguishes this biography from earlier ones by D. Daiches and E.K. Brown is its incomparably larger scope and its feminist perspective...The biography has all the strengths of feminist criticism at its best. With the impressive psychological insight of the same-sex biographer and with a daunting wealth of detail, O'Brien evokes the experience of Cather, a girl...in an environment so restrictive to an ambitious female that her only option is to denounce her gender, cross-dress, and change her name to William...The Willa Cather who emerges from O'Brien's biography is not the familiar character of a writer who happened to be female, but the less known one of a woman writer who had to assert her right to be herself every part of the way...An absorbing story of a fascinating literary personality.
-- Joanna Durczak European Association of American Studies