Rachel becomes convinced it is with the deliberate intention of ruining Nancy. It is to Rachel that Nancy runs for help, as she finds it increasingly hard to keep out of Martin Colbert’s way. Rachel’s decision to help Nancy will set her against her mother, but change Nancy’s life forever. I am not going to go on about the fact that there is language used in this novel that we would find deeply offensive and inappropriate now – that surely is a given. The novel is set in the 1850’s and was first published in 1940 – but I think Cather’s intention is clear enough. She was not writing an angry treatise on slavery – her novel is a retrospective of a society and a time thankfully long over but which concerned the generation of her grandparents, and about which she was brought up hearing stories of.