The English novelist A. S. Byatt observes that with each work, Cather reinvented the novel form to investigate the changes in the human condition over time. Particularly in her frontier novels, Cather wrote of both the beauty and terror of life. Like the exiled characters of Henry James, an author who had a significant influence on Cather, most of Cather's major characters live as exiled immigrants, identifying with the immigrants' "sense of homelessness and exile" following her own feelings of exile living on the frontier. Susan J. Rosowski wrote that Cather was "the first to give immigrants heroic stature in serious American literature."