When I strike the open plains, something happens.  I'm home.  I breathe differently.  That love of great spaces, of rolling open country like the sea--it's the great passion of my life.
                        - Willa Cather

For Willa Cather, the place where she grew up –  the American Midwest – was her inspiration and the deepest source of her art.  She felt moved by the landscape the same way Thea Kronborg of The Song of the Lark was moved when she heard Dvorak's New World Symphony for the first time:

When the first movement ended, Thea's hands and feet were cold as ice... Here were the Sand Hills, the grasshoppers and locusts, all the things that wakened and chirped in the early morning;  the reaching and reaching of high plains, the immeasurable yearning of all flat lands.  There was home in it, too; first memories long ago; the amazement of a new soul in a new world; a soul new and yet old, that had dreamed something dispairing, something glorious, in the dark before it was born....  (174)

In 1883, when Cather was ten years old, her family left Virginia for Nebraska.  Having known only the lush green and wooded hills of Virginia, Willa felt shock when she first encountered the flat, treeless plains, but soon, the wide open spaces of this land would steal into her heart and become a part of her, just as the lark's song took hold of  Thea:  "It was over flat lands like this, stretching out to drink the sun, that the larks sang--and one's heart sang there, too...."  (191-2)

The Song of the Lark is the story of a young girl who comes of age in a pioneer western town, maturing through several stages of awakening into a woman and artist.  Although Cather based the character of Thea Kronborg on the famed opera singer Olive Fremstad, there are many elements of Cather's own life in Thea's story. The story is set in Moonstone, Colorado, an exact replica of Red Cloud, Nebraska, where Cather spent her youth.  Both fiction and real settings were  bustling railroad towns in the middle of windswept open country.

Like Cather, Thea is an adventurous girl who loves to explore the land beyond the town.  The creeks, canyons, gullies and sand hills all appealed to her:

On her thirteenth birthday she wandered for a long while about the sand ridges, picking up crystals and looking into the yellow prickly pear blossoms with their thousand stamens.  She looked at the sand hills until she wished she were a sand hill. (70)

Thea lives in a white frame house just like Cather's house in Red Cloud, down to the details of her attic room, with its low slanted ceilings and flowered wallpaper.  Thea spends hours in this room, reading and dreaming, her body "pulsing with ardor and anticipation."  It is during these private moments that Thea senses that she carries within her a potential self as yet unborn:

How deep they lay, these second persons, and how little one knew about them, except to guard them fiercely.  It was to music, more than anything else, that these hidden things in people responded. (189)

Much of Thea's story concerns her struggle to bring the artist within her to life – something that would take hard work, discipline, perseverance and passion.  There are a number of adults in Thea's early life who recognize and nurture this hidden self.  All of these characters are based on people Cather knew in Red Cloud.  In the opening chapter, Dr. Archie nurses Thea through a bout of pneumonia, just as Dr. McKeeby had nursed Willa.  As Thea matures,  Dr. Archie often takes her on his rounds, showing her a side of life that she would otherwise not see. In  Mexican Town, for example, she meets Spanish Johnny, a wandering musician given to bouts of drinking and madness, and his long-suffering wife, Mrs. Tellamantez.  It is when she sings a duet with Spanish Johnny at a dance in Mexican Town that she discovers the natural tones and sensual depths of her true voice.  The alcoholic Professor Wunsch, who teaches Thea piano and instills in her a love of music, is based on the itinerant German musician Schindelmeisser, who gave Cather music lessons.  The railroad brakeman Ray Kennedy is also drawn from real life.  He introduces Thea to the world of nature outside of town by taking her on trips deep into the sand hills where she can collect "bits of brilliant stone, crystal and agates and onyx, and petrified wood as red as blood."   Ray, an unschooled man who had run away from home as a boy and had been to Mexico and the American Southwest, fires Thea's imagination with his tales of cliff-dwellings,  burial mounds with their caches of pottery and feather blankets, and the perfectly preserved corpse of a woman with a string of turquoise around her neck. 

Years later, after Ray has died in a tragic accident and Thea has left Moonstone to make her way as a singer in Chicago,  she visits the Southwest and lives in a cliff dwelling – an experience that proves pivotal to her development as an artist.  Willa also made a trip to the Southwest that was a turning point in her life as a writer.  At that time, she had a successful career in New York as a writer and editor.  But it wasn't until she journeyed back to the West she had known and imagined as a child that she became a great writer.  After this trip she produced her greatest works: O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and The Song of the Lark.  These works are all or partly set in the American West, drawn from Cather's memories of place and based on the richly diverse lives of the people she knew. 

Similarly, Thea does not become a great singer until she returns to the land she knew and dreamed of as a child. Thea leaves Moonstone because she feels confined by the narrow conventions that were imposed on women at the time.  In Chicago, she has difficulties supporting herself while working constantly to become a singer.  Feeling exhausted and discouraged, she makes a trip to Panther Canyon, Arizona.  It is here that she awakens to herself as a woman and artist.  She falls in love and loses her love.  It is in experiencing this emotional pain that she discovers her strength as a woman and ultimately as an artist.  Thea finds strength in the harsh but beautiful landscape of the desert and canyon.  The ancient arts of the Native American Indian women inspire her.  It is there that Thea recalls her childhood in Moonstone, and realizes that her memories of place and people are a deep part of her, something that she will never lose.  In this crucial realization, the artist within her is born. 

Ten years later in New York City, Thea dwells in a high rise which is like a "perpendicular cliff" overlooking a steep drop to the river – a modern parallel to the cliff dwellings.  At the peak of her creative powers, she sings with a "deep-rooted vitality," her voice carrying within it the power of her memories of place – "the light, the color, the feeling.  Most of all, the feeling."  The spirit of place has entered the spirit of her song.

Quotations taken from Signet Classic edition of The Song of the Lark.