Sapphira and the Slave GirlWilla Cathers twelfth and final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, is her most intense fictional engagement with political and personal conflict. Set in Cathers Virginia birthplace in 1856, the novel draws on family and local history and the escalating conflicts of the last years of slaveryconflicts in which Cathers family members were deeply involved, both as slave owners and as opponents of slavery. Cather, at five years old, appears as a character