Farm to Form: Modernist Literature and Ecologies of Food in the British Empire by Jessica Martell (review)

amount of sleeves-rolled-up historical work—and by knowing just about everything there is to know about Cather’s fiction, her letters, and the scholarly tradition that has grown up around her work (a tradition that Stout treats with scrupulous generosity). Paradoxically, it is this very authority that yields the book’s welcome freedom from the biographer’s customary tendentiousness, its fully earned sense that, when considering a writer’s relation to her inordinately varied era, exploration is often more valuable than certainty.