Cather was a writer who emerged at a transitional moment in the evolution of American culture, and the complexity of her work results from her responses to this shifting historical matrix. Born in 1873, she was an American of the late-Victorian period, and she lived her early life in the relatively provincial backwater of rural Nebraska. But it would be a patronizing mistake to see this historical and geographical context as inevitably quiet or conservative or politically insignificant. This was a time of considerable political ferment, a ferment that was formative in shaping her fiction's social and political dimensions. After the settlement of the prairies and their initial cultivation by American and European pioneers, the later years of the nineteenth century were lean. The 1890s, when Cather was a student in Lincoln and then a fledgling journalist, were a decade of agricultural crisis. Crop failures, drought, and depopulation (as the prairie schooners continued to move westwards, beyond such states as Kansas and Nebraska) heralded a crisis. Then the Panic of 1893, when a London financial firm abruptly crashed, saw British investors pull their money out of the United States, precipitating a three-year depression (and, as we shall see, directly affecting Nebraskans whom Cather knew). The rise in unemployment and strikes was eerily premonitory of the 1930s, and the crisis touched Cather's state too. In 1895 the power company in her hometown of Red Cloud failed; “the town had no electricity for ten years.” The decade taught Nebraskans tough lessons about a globalizing economy, about failure as well as success.