More than fifteen years pass before he musters up enough courage to find out what really happened to her. While living in New York, Jim hears rumors of Ántonia's ruin. Similar to Cather, Jim regards the land as "the happiness and curse" of his life. Still, Jim cannot escape his love for either Ántonia or the prairie. He flees to Boston to avoid a lasting romance with her. In Book Two, Jim's family leaves the prairie for the small town of Black Hawk, where many of the young immigrant women help alleviate their families' financial hardships by becoming the town's "hired girls." After Jim leaves Black Hawk to attend the University of Nebraska, he reunites with Norwegian Lena Lingard, who has become a successful dressmaker in Lincoln.
Book One, for example, begins with an idyllic autumn of exploration for Jim and Ántonia it ends with a bitter winter and an unforeseen family tragedy that changes Ántonia's life forever. Instead, each book contains thematic contrasts. As Cather intended, there is no plot in the usual sense of the word. The novel comprises five sections, called "books" by the author, and may appear at first to lack a cohesive structure. Unlike Cather, Jim is an orphan joining his paternal grandparents on the Nebraska Divide.
As Cather herself did, ten-year-old Jim has left Virginia for Nebraska by train and is shocked by the barren prairie on his first wagon ride. A beloved American classic, Willa Cather's My Ántonia (1918) is best summarized by its epigraph: "the best days are the first to flee." In it, the adult narrator, Jim Burden, remembers his childhood through the memory of his friend, Ántonia Shimerda.
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