Summary Jim has been living with his grandparents for nearly three years when they decide to move into the town of Black Hawk. Jake and Otto help them move, then they leave and go west together; except for a postcard from Otto, the Burdens never hear from them again. By […]

Read more Summary and Analysis Book II: The Hired Girls: Chapters I-IV

Summary July comes on hot and breathless. Jim is kept busy carrying water to the men harvesting wheat. The Burdens enjoy having Antonia around, even though she clatters pans in the kitchen and runs through the house. Early every morning she goes with Jim to the garden to get vegetables […]

Read more Summary and Analysis Book I: The Shimerdas: Chapter XIX

Summary By spring, the Shimerdas are living in their new log house, which the neighbors helped build. When Jim rides over to see them, Mrs. Shimerda questions him about what the men are doing in the fields; she thinks they’re withholding valuable farming secrets from her family. Jim is amazed […]

Read more Summary and Analysis Book I: The Shimerdas: Chapters XVII-XVIII

Summary When Jim awakens on the morning of January 22, he learns that after dinner the night before, Mr. Shimerda committed suicide in the barn, putting the barrel of his gun into his mouth and pulling the trigger with his big toe. Ambrosch brought the news to the Burdens in […]

Read more Summary and Analysis Book I: The Shimerdas: Chapters XIV-XVI

Summary A thaw follows Christmas, and the prairie is soon warmed by three weeks of fine weather. Mrs. Shimerda and Antonia visit the Burdens. Still grumbling, Mrs. Shimerda complains about how her family struggles in poverty while the Burdens live in relative luxury. She snatches an iron pot from the […]

Read more Summary and Analysis Book I: The Shimerdas: Chapter XIII

Summary The first few weeks of winter are beautiful but bitter, and Jim takes Antonia and Yulka in a sled, which Otto built, to the Russians’ old house. When they start back, around four, the wind has come up, howling across the plains, and the sky has become gray. The […]

Read more Summary and Analysis Book I: The Shimerdas: Chapters IX-XII

Summary Antonia and Jim ride over to visit Pavel and Peter, two Russians whom Antonia’s father has befriended. Pavel isn’t home, but Peter is delighted to see them. He shows them around the farm, feeds them watermelon, and entertains them by playing the harmonica. When they are ready to leave, […]

Read more Summary and Analysis Book I: The Shimerdas: Chapters V-VIII

Summary After Jim Burden’s parents die, his Virginia relatives send the ten-year-old boy to live with his grandparents on their Nebraska farm. He travels by train in the care of teenage Jake Marpole, who was a “hand,” a man hired to do chores, on his father’s farm. The passenger conductor […]

Read more Summary and Analysis Book I: The Shimerdas: Chapters I-IV

Summary The narrator meets a childhood friend, Jim Burden, now a successful lawyer for a railroad company, while on a train trip crossing Iowa, and they reminisce about growing up in the same small Nebraska town. When Jim says he wonders why the narrator has never written about Antonia, the […]

Read more Summary and Analysis Introduction

The Narrator Jim Burden gives the manuscript for My Antonia to the unnamed narrator in the introduction to the novel. Because Cather drew many incidents and people in this novel from her own life, her intent in creating this anonymous narrator may have been, in part, to dissuade readers from […]

Read more Character List