SOURCE: “Dispossession and Redemption in the Novels of Willa Cather,” in Cather Studies, Vol. 1, 1990, pp. 36-54.

In the following essay, Fisher-Wirth categorizes Death Comes for the Archbishop as the fifth in the series of Cather's novels—including My Ántonia, A Lost Lady, The Professor's House, and My Mortal Enemy—that deal with issues of fall and redemption.

Man was lost and saved in a garden.

—Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

Death Comes for the Archbishop is an anomaly in Willa Cather's fiction. Massive, serene, and luminous, it is scarcely a novel at all; it lacks the novel's defining feature, psychological development and change. Nor does the book have much conflict. Moments of danger in the present end as soon as they begin.¹ Episodes of suspense or terror in the past come to the reader contained and made safe by means of a framed narration.² The crises...