num_pages: 176
description: This collection of Willa Cather stories—her first book of fiction and the capstone of her early career—is as relevant today as at the time of its initial publication. As different and individually distinguished as the seven stories may be, they share as their subject the role and status of the artist in American society. The passions, ambitions, and pretensions, the cant and the pathos of the art world, artists, pseudo-artists, aficionados, and dilettantes—all are amply represented here in the midst of their foibles, grand affairs, and failures, drawn with great style and subtlety by a writer gathering her formidable powers. With the psychological precision of her early master Henry James and the practical wisdom and wit of her contemporary Edith Wharton, Cather shows us innocents seduced, sophisticates undone, marriages sundered, idealism compromised, and the rare soul uplifted by art.
language: English
title: The Troll Garden
titlecomplete: The Troll Garden
characters: Henry Steavens, Clark, Georgiana Carpenter, Imogen Willard, Raymond d'Esquerré, Jemima Broadwood, Monsieur Emile Roux, MacMaster, Caroline Noble, Jim Laird, Everett Hilgarde, Arthur Hamilton, Adriance Hilgarde, Martin Merrick, Katharine Gaylord, Harvey Merrick, Annie Merrick, Flavia Hamilton, Sir Hugh Treffinger, Howard Noble, Lady Mary Percy, Charley Gaylord
genres: Literature, Short Stories, Classics, Fiction, Literary Fiction, American
ratings_count: 351
places: Kansas, Boston, Massachusetts, London, England, New York (State), Wyoming, Pennsylvania, Long Island, New York, Tarrytown, New York, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New York City, New York
publisher: University of Nebraska Press