There was also music. Not long ago, while researching Cather’s lifelong love of Wagner’s operas, I came across a hitherto unseen trace of Red Cloud’s Europeanness. Several sources mention that Cather studied piano with a music teacher named Schindelmeisser. This man served as the model for the character of Wunsch, in “The Song of the Lark”—a dissolute but impassioned immigrant musician who is among the first to glimpse the talent of Thea Kronborg, destined to become a leading Wagner singer. After digging through newspaper archives, census records, telephone directories, and shipping manifests, I concluded that he was Albert Schindelmeisser, the son of Louis Schindelmeisser, a distinguished German composer and conductor of the mid-nineteenth century, and an ally of Wagner and Liszt.

The life story that can be reconstructed from circumstantial evidence is a rather sad one, suitable for one of Cather’s darker prairie tales. Schindelmeisser came to America in 1862, when he was twenty, and got a job teaching at Lawrence University, in Wisconsin. In an article for the Lawrence college paper, he wrote, “Of all arts music is the most pure and elevated, the most ennobling in its influences.” By 1870, however, he had left the college and established a pattern of being unwilling or unable to stay in one place for any length of time. He worked in Kansas and Iowa as a teacher and a piano tuner, then popped up in Red Cloud in 1884 and 1885. A notice of an event at the Baptist church, to which the Cather family belonged, said that “Mr Schindlemeisser, at the piano, showed himself master of the situation and called forth loud applause.” By 1886, though, he was back in Kansas. After that, the trail grows thin. Notices of unclaimed letters suggest that he passed through Kansas City and Macon, Missouri. He was in Nashville in 1898. The name does not appear in the 1900 census. He was known to be a heavy drinker, and alcoholism is likely the best explanation for his erratic career. In “The Song of the Lark,” Wunsch’s drinking eventually forces him to leave town, but his acknowledgment of Thea Kronborg’s talent encourages her to pursue singing.

From this roughshod Europe of the mind, Cather also emerged with a complex understanding of American identity. Her symphonic landscapes are inflected with myriad accents, cultures, personal narratives—all stored away in a prodigious memory. When she went off to college, at the University of Nebraska, she was already an imperious cosmopolitan, entirely unafraid to make her views known. She had thought of studying science or medicine, but her command of prose pulled her toward writing. In 1893, she published her first journalistic piece for the Lincoln Nebraska State Journal: thus began a two-decade run as a literary critic, drama and music critic, all-purpose reporter, and editor. She went on to Pittsburgh, editing a women’s magazine, and ended up in New York, working at McClure’s, the great American magazine of the Gilded Age.

Cather was a mercurial but brilliant critic, veering between ecstatic raves and brutal takedowns. The takedowns were disconcerting to performers who came to town expecting a docile press. The “meat-ax young girl,” she was called. An unlucky actress was characterized as an “unattractive, putty-faced, backachy, headachy little minx.” One actor, she wrote, “stops just where elocution ends and acting begins.” Her reporting was not always trustworthy. In a piece about the painter Edward Burne-Jones, she claims to have interviewed Burne-Jones’s former valet; no such person seems to have existed. But the writing tends to be more distinctive than in her apprentice fiction of the same period.

The prairie figures in some of Cather’s early stories, but she focusses more often on artists, actors, singers, and writers—denizens of the transatlantic world that she herself joined in short order. These are evocative tales, but the sketches of high-society types are sometimes breathless and thin. When the prairie does enter the picture, as in the 1904 story “A Wagner Matinée,” Cather regains her lordly confidence: “The world there was the flat world of the ancients; to the east, a cornfield that stretched to daybreak; to the west, a corral that reached to sunset; between, the conquests of peace, dearer bought than those of war.” She made her first European trip in 1902, in the company of a wealthy Pittsburgh friend, Isabelle McClung, with whom she was evidently in love. On a train ride through rural France, Cather experienced an epiphany: on seeing a “reaper of a well-known American make,” she imagined a girl sitting on it, between her father’s feet. She understood that Nebraska had already given her the stuff of epics. “O Pioneers!” appeared in 1913, and her mature career began.

The area around Red Cloud has long been known as the Divide—a geographical term for a plateau bordered by rivers. Cather titled one of her first important prairie stories “On the Divide.” Cather scholars have not been able to resist using the word in a symbolic sense. The late David Porter borrowed it for his 2008 study, “On the Divide,” which documents Cather’s painstaking construction of her public image, and in particular her attempt, largely successful, to straddle the divide between commerce and art. In 1926, Porter shows, she went to the trouble of inventing an interview with herself—a scene of a journalist badgering the author as she waits for a train in Grand Central Terminal. (It’s as if the younger Cather were buttonholing the elder.) Her world contains other figurative divides: between America and Europe, the Romantic and the modern, country and city, the political left and the political right.

The divides of gender and sexuality remain the most contested ground. The Cather biographer Sharon O’Brien opened discussion of the lesbian question in a 1984 essay, prompting a wave of queer-studies readings and an inevitable backlash. At a luncheon in Red Cloud, I spoke to Melissa Homestead, a scholar at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who is working on a highly anticipated book about Cather’s relationship with the Nebraska-born, New York-based editor Edith Lewis. The two women met in 1903, at the home of a mutual friend in Lincoln—Lewis later wrote of Cather’s “transparently clear, level, unshrinking gaze”—and began living together in 1908. Homestead told me, “Everyone wants to know what kind of relationship this was. I have been through all Cather’s surviving letters, and there is no ‘smoking gun.’ ” Homestead, who is lesbian, laughed at the phrase. “But what’s apparent, over and over, is that she and Lewis were thought of as a unit. She would write, ‘Miss Lewis is coming with me.’ People send their regards to both of them. So the question is: What kind of evidence is needed to establish this as a lesbian relationship? Photographs of the two of them in bed together? She was an integral part of Cather’s life, creatively and personally.”

Homestead is impatient not only with those who dismiss the possibility of Cather’s lesbianism but also with those who scan her work for evidence of her closetedness. O’Brien made much of a remark Cather made, in her 1922 essay “The Novel Démeublé,” that fiction depends on “whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there . . . the inexplicable presence of the thing not named.” For Homestead, this emphasis on secretiveness is misleading. She told me, “People picture her as full of shame, destroying letters left and right. Yes, almost all her letters to Lewis are missing. But three thousand letters is still a lot, and the relationship with Lewis is all over them. If she wanted to hide it, she did a bad job.”