Sapphira and Slave Girl

A Vintage Classic paperback

In her final novel, Willa Cather departed from her usual Great Plains settings to plumb the turbulent relationships between slaves and their owners in the antebellum South. Sapphira and the Slave Girl is set in Virginia just before the Civil War. Sapphira is a slave owner who feels she has come down in the world and channels her resentments into jealousy of her beatuiful mulatto slave, Nancy. Sapphira's daughter Rachel, and abolitionist, opposes her mother's increasingly shocking attempts to persecute Nancy. The struggles of these three strong-willed women provided rich material for Cather's narrative art and psychological insight.