The Song of the Lark

Thea Kronborg, the daughter of a Swedish Methodist minister in the little desert town of Moonstone, Colorado, has a gift for music that sets her apart. Helped by a doctor, a railway man and a Mexican neighbour who believe in her, she goes to study piano in Chicago, where a teacher discovers that her real gift is her voice. A summer among the ancient cliff dwellings of Arizona awakens her as an artist, and the novel follows her long struggle to become a great opera singer.

Willa Cather published the novel in 1915, inspired partly by the Swedish-American soprano Olive Fremstad and partly by her own escape from the prairie to become an artist. The title comes from a painting by Jules Breton of a peasant girl stopping in a field to listen to a lark. From here, try My Ántonia and O Pioneers!.