My Ántonia
Two children come into Black Hawk, Nebraska, on the same night train — an orphaned Virginia boy going out to his grandparents' farm, and a Bohemian family who have bought land nobody could work — and Jim Burden spends the rest of his life measuring what he has against the girl who got down with them. Ántonia Shimerda loses her father to the first winter, hires out as a town girl while Jim reads for the university, and takes the consequences of a choice he can only watch from a distance. Jim's Virgil, and the epigraph, come from the Georgics rather than the Aeneid: the best days are the first to flee.
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Attributes
Plot structure
Quest object (Greimas)
Symbol / motif
Conflict
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
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