The study of the significance of Cather's sexuality for her writing was decisively launched by Sharon O'Brien in a 1984 essay; subsequent work in this area takes O'Brien's 1987 biography of Cather as a benchmark, a necessary point of departure. In “'The Thing Not Named': Willa Cather as a Lesbian Writer,” O'Brien linked the topics I address here - the question of Cather's artistic practices; the question of her sexuality - in the phrase she highlights from Cather's programmatic 1922 essay, “The Novel Démeublé.” “The thing not named” names the love that dare not speak its name, the crime not to be named among Christians. For O'Brien, Cather's self-recognition as a lesbian was inscribed under this prohibition (O'Brien found evidence for this self-understanding in an 1892 letter of Cather's to Louise Pound). “Cather did not fully or uncritically internalize the emotionally crippling definition of lesbianism as 'sick' or 'perverse' and challenged the social construction of female friendship as unnatural. And yet simultaneously she could not help accepting it” (p. 81). Out of this ambivalence, O'Brien argued, Cather fashioned gender-ambivalent characters (as she had early named herself William Cather, MD; she signed the letter to Pound “William”), displaced same-sex desire into luscious descriptions of feminized landscapes, and eventually molded strong women characters who, however, never were coupled with other women.