WHOSE RELATIONSHIP WAS IT ANYWAY?
The distilled ardor, the astonished, silenced respect, hangs in the air as Willa Cather describes her “A Chance Meeting” with “’Caro’ of the Lettres à sa Nièce Caroline,” Flaubert’s niece whom he raised and of whom he wrote. For Willa what was so unexpectedly happening in this auspicious encounter was laden with the immensity of her own childhood literary personal history looking back at her, speaking to her. They had this shared childhood in a summit of literature, and here now was the little girl, now as an old woman who had lived that reality in the very home of Flaubert as the works were being written, and an eloquent and learned Caroline, too, a help in that. Willa, who had...