Audiobook · read by volunteers
Alexander's Bridge
Willa Cather (1873–1947)
Read by Eva, Lucy Burgoyne (1950-2014) · 11 chapters · 3 h 19
About the book
Bartley Alexander is a celebrated engineer whose bridges are admired the world over. His life seems complete: a respected career, a graceful wife named Winifred, a home in Boston. Then, on a visit to London, he meets again an old love, Hilda Burgoyne, an actress he knew in his youth, and the past begins to press on the present. Willa Cather’s first novel is a compact, finely drawn study of a man confronting his own inner divisions, at a time of life we would now call a crisis, and of the strain between duty and desire. Eleven chapters and about three and a half hours, shared between two readers, make a sober and elegant story. A quiet, intense first step into the world of an important American novelist. Read with care.
Introduction
Willa Cather, who lived from 1873 to 1947, was an American writer best known for her novels of the Great Plains, such as O Pioneers! and My Ántonia. Alexander’s Bridge, published in 1912, was her first novel. It is set in a very different world from her later prairie books, moving between Boston and London, and it features a successful engineer at its centre.
The story concerns Bartley Alexander, a construction engineer and world-renowned builder of bridges, who is going through what is known today, but was not known in 1912, as a mid-life crisis. Although he is married to his wife Winifred, Bartley resumes his acquaintance with a former lover, Hilda Burgoyne, in London. The affair proves to gnaw at Bartley’s sense of propriety and honour. Cather uses the engineer’s profession as a metaphor, since bridges depend on the soundness of their foundations, and the novel asks whether a life can also be sound if it is divided.
Cather herself later regarded the novel as an apprentice work and felt that she found her true voice only with her prairie fiction. Even so, it is a polished and tightly constructed book, and readers can see in it the care for form and the restraint that mark her mature style.
This LibriVox recording consists of eleven chapters and lasts about three hours and twenty minutes. It is read by two volunteers, Eva and Lucy Burgoyne, who died in 2014. It is also short enough to hear in a single weekend, which makes it a good starting point for readers new to Cather.
Public domain
Willa Cather died in 1947: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text