Assaulted by theorists ...

... What's In Willa Cather's Letters : The New Yorker. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

This hard-working writer, who hailed from a dusty little town in Nebraska, who at the beginning had no credentials, no money, no influential friends, and who—forget the rest—was of the wrong sex (in the twenties and thirties, American literature’s top echelons were largely reserved for men): this woman, because she was supposedly a lesbian and because, therefore, all her work was considered encoded, full of secrets, was made the sport of literary theorists. And while they were snuffling about in her presumed recesses, all the great things about her—her profundity, her stern tragic sense, her grand, unshowy musical prose (she may have had a better ear than any other American novelist)—all these were ignored.