MY ANTONIA is the wistful tale of an immigrant girl from Bohemia,who has settled in Nebraska.Narrated by Antonia's childhood friend Jim Burden,the novel draws heavily upon Willa Cather's own formative years,as well as,through the persona of Jim,Cather's experience of New York,where she worked as Editor of the MCCLURE magazine.MY ANTONIA is the third in a sequence of Cather's works which deal with immigrant settlers in the USA.Writing as a lesbian in an era in which homosexuality had yet to meet with public tolerance,Cather populated her fiction with strong female protagonists; Antonia is one such heroine,an embodiment of the pioneering spirit of a new nation.