The professor's house

The Professor's House is a novel by Willa Cather, first published in 1925. Its historian, Godfrey St. Peter, faces a family move and a crisis of middle age at the height of his professional success.

While his wife and daughters settle into a new home, St. Peter keeps working in the attic study of their old house. The room holds the habits of his life's work and memories of Tom Outland, making the old house a refuge from increasingly strained family life.

Outland, St. Peter's gifted former student and his daughter Rosamond's late fiancé, left an invention whose patent now supports the family's new wealth. The novel's central section gives Tom's own account of a discovery in the Southwest, preserving his remembered idealism.

Cather's three-part structure sets material success beside scholarship, grief, friendship, and the ownership of the past. St. Peter's withdrawal becomes a test of inward solitude: whether detachment can protect what he values without extinguishing his desire to live.

"The moving was over and done. Professor St. Peter was alone in the dismantled house where he had lived ever since his marriage, where he had worked out his career and brought up his two daughters. It was almost as ugly as it is possible for a house to be; square, three stories in height, painted the colour of ashes—the front porch just too narrow for comfort, with a slanting floor and sagging steps."