The novelist finds some startlingly fresh stories – from Mark Twain, Willa Cather, Annie Proulx and others – in the old west

Ian Pindar, Judith Rice and John Dugdale on That Neutral Island | Talleyrand | Can Any Mother Help Me? | Willa Cather | Henry VIII's Last Victim

Ignored by male critics and obscured by feminist readings and biographies, Willa Cather's fiction hasn't always been given the recognition it deserves. Her understated stories of the stoicism, passion and violence of frontier life contain the mysteries of great writing, argues AS Byatt.