My Antonia begins with Jim, our narrator, telling us that "more than any other person we remembered, this girl seemed to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of childhood." The girl of course is Antonia. We do not understand how she can represent "the adventure" but as we read on and learn about her, we begin to understand how Antonia can mean the country. When Jim moved to Nebraska at a young age, he was imersed in a pioneer life. He lived in a hardworking household who lived off the land. Yet somehow his neighbor Antonia is the embodiment of all these frontier life ideas. Antonia and her family are pioneers from Bohemia. They traveled to America without knowing the language, or what to expect. Antonia and her family managed through their harsh first winter, nearly starving, leading to the loss of their father, and they grow only stronger. Antonia understands the importance of her family life. In a new world, their family is the only familiarity they have. She gives up school to work on the land with her brother because she knows her responsibility to her family. She likes to discover the land and notices the differences between the midwest plains and her home in Bohemia.

As she grows up, Antonia goes through more tough times but copes with the difficulties. She finds herself pregnant and is deserted by Larry but is determined to make a better life. She treasures her baby daughter and starts to work for her brother. My Antonia may be fiction but women who felt empowered rather than intimidated by the far stretches of land were real as shown in the journals.

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