My Mortal Enemy, Willa Cather. New York: Open Road Media, 2022 (Originally published in 1926).

Summary: The story of Myra Driscoll Henshawe, who forsakes a fortune to go with her love to pursue fortune and fame in New York City.

This enigmatic novella by Willa Cather has recently passed into ranks of Public Domain works. Published in 1926, it comes between The Professor’s House and Death Comes for the Archbishop and is strikingly unlike either. The novella length is one distinction. The setting another, and the lead character a third.

The story begins in small town Illinois where Myra and Oliver Henshawe return to the small Illinois where they started out, falling in love and deciding to forsake Myra’s family fortune to pursue their own fortune ande fame in New York. And by local standards, it appears they have made it, especially as seen through the eyes of Nellie Birdseye and her mother Lydia, who are invited to go back to New York for the holidays.

Myra is a patron of the arts, the opera, and knows many wealthy people. Her apartment is richly furnished. Yet the reality is that Oliver has been but a modest success, and little “gaps” show themselves in Myra’s facade–times of jealousy and anger and disappointment with OIiver. We see Myra’s unhappiness in her decision to take the train with Nellie and Lydia back to Pittsburgh, getting away from Oliver.

The second part of the story occurs ten years later in a western town. Nellie is working there and runs into Oliver Henshawe. She learns that Oliver lost his job and they have fallen on hard times and live in a small apartment with noisy upstairs neighbors in the same town. Myra is ill, and, as it turns out, dying of a malignant growth. Oliver tends her faithfully but nothing satisfies her. At one point, she rails on him saying, “Why must I die like this, alone with my mortal enemy?” Nellie hears all this as she takes it on herself to have tea with Myra regularly, taking her to a favorite lookout, where, in the end, she is found dead.

One the one hand, Myra is an enthralling character, certainly for Nellie. And yet through Nellie’s eyes, we see a woman who nourishes fantastic ambitions that she imposes on OIiver, who loving and diligent as he is, is unable to achieve. Yet I find myself asking, was Oliver really the mortal enemy? I wonder if it was in fact her own disappointment, and her unwillingness to forgive the man who disappointed her. Or rather, was it life itself, which failed to live up to her expectations, leaving her to die in a seedy apartment? It all seems a sad tale of a woman so obsessed with what she wanted that she never could see what she had.