Guide to Reading Letter Transcriptions
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| Textual Feature | Appearance |
|---|---|
| passage deleted with a strikethrough mark | |
| passage deleted by overwritten added letters | |
| passage added above the line | passage with added text above |
| passage added on the line | passage with added text inline |
| passage added in the margin | passage with text added in margin |
| handwritten addition to a typewritten letter | typed passage with added handwritten text |
| missing or unreadable text | missing text noted with "[illegible]" |
| uncertain transcriptions | word[?] |
| notes written by someone other than Willa Cather | Note in another's hand |
| printed letterhead text | printed text |
| text printed on postcards, envelopes, etc. | printed text |
| text of date and place stamps | stamped text |
| passage written by Cather on separate enclosure. | written text |
Hunt3 used to say, someday though, and I mightily hope you'll like 'em.
Well my Thanksgiving visit to Columbus4 was a
glittering, dazzling success, at least it was to me. Mr.5 & Mrs. Canfield6 were
in New York7, and Dorothy8 and Jim9 and Stella10 and I had the
house to ours ourselves—or rather we did'nt. we had dinner parties and theatre parties, and tea parties, until I came
home a pallid wreck. Dorothy arrives to visit me day after tomorrow and I hope
to be wrecked again by the same grateful process. She certainly is the "Real Thing",11 is Dorothy. The Kappa's12 in Columbus tear each others
hair for her, and they are so infernally jealous that I fear for my life when I am
there.
I have been spending a good deal of my leisure time with Ethelbert Nevin13, and surely there is no one with whom it could be more happily or profitably spent. Take him all in all, he is about the most loveable man I have ever met, and I am prouder of his friendship than I have ever been of anything. Quite apart from his genius he has a nobleness of soul that helps every life he touches.—No, not apart from his genius, for it is the well-head of his genius, and the compositions to which he signs his name contain only a little of the fineness and beauty of the man. But you'll think I am a matinee girl sure enough.
Write me when you can, Mariel1, and I'll reply more promptly next time. Again thank you, and remember me to all14. I was reading some of Kipling's15 verses last night, and the ghost of the days I used to read them up at your house when I should have been getting my Greek lessons, came back
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0055.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0055
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto and verso. Document is a fragment of a letter.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Mariel C. Gere1
- Date letter was written
- [December 1898]
- Explanation of conjectured date
-
Cather visited Dorothy Canfield and her family in Columbus, OH, in October 1898. As Thanksgiving was on 24 November that year, this letter was most likely written in December 1898.
- Place letter was written
- Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Willa Cather Collection (RG2639.AM), Nebraska State Historical Society, Lincoln, NE
Individual Annotations
Possibly an allusion to the title of Henry James story, "The Real Thing" (1892).
Dorothy Canfield was a member of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority at the Ohio State University.
Person Annotations
Gere, Mariel Clapham (1874-1960). Cather’s university friend; a teacher. Mariel Gere, eldest daughter of Charles H. and Mariel C. Gere, born in Lincoln, NE, entered the University of Nebraska's prep school in the same year Cather did. She and her sisters visited Cather several times in Red Cloud, NE. Both were members of the Union Literary Society until Gere joined the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority in 1892. Gere graduated in the science course and taught chemistry at Lincoln High until 1941. She also served on the Lincoln City Library board for many years. Cather and Gere remained friends and correspondents; Gere defended Cather from accusations that she had been arrogant and friendless during her university years.
Hunt, Ebenezer W. (1851-1913). University of Nebraska professor; agriculturist. Born in New York, Hunt joined the faculty of the University of Nebraska in 1887 as a teacher of rhetoric and oratory. A brilliant and eccentric teacher, he resigned in 1893 because of his health, retiring to a farm in Otoe County, NE, with his second wife and three children. Cather wrote an essay on Thomas Carlyle for Hunt’s rhetoric class, which he sent to the Nebraska State Journal, where it appeared on March 1, 1891. Cather later claimed that the sight of her work in print gave her the desire to be a writer. Cather mentions Hunt a few times in her letters.
Canfield, James Hulme (1847-1909). Educator, chancellor of the
University of Nebraska. James Canfield was born in Ohio but grew
up in Vermont and New York City. After graduating from Williams College in
1868, he went west, where he married Flavia Camp in 1873. Their children
were James A. Canfield and Dorothy Canfield (Fisher). He was appointed
professor of history at the University of Kansas in Lawrence in 1877; from
there he was called to be chancellor of the University of Nebraska in 1891.
Cather’s class made him an honorary member of their class, as they had all
entered the university that year. A dynamic man, he was popular with the
students and with people throughout Nebraska, a tireless campaigner for the
value of the rapidly growing university to the state. Ohio State University
called him to its presidency in 1895; from there he went to Columbia
University as head librarian from 1899 until his death in 1909.
Canfield, Flavia Camp (1844-1930). Clubwoman; painter; mother of Dorothy Canfield. Flavia Camp was born in Wisconsin, although her family came from Vermont. She was an early graduate of the University of Wisconsin and taught school and art before marrying James H. Canfield in 1873. Their son James A. Canfield was born in 1874, and their daughter Dorothy in 1879. A painter, Flavia studied in Europe, taking her daughter with her on several occasions. She was an activist and social reformer as well, believing in the power of women to effect change by organizing. She was one of the founders of the University of Nebraska Women’s Club, as well as the Ohio State Women’s Club and many others, and was president of the Ohio Federation of Women’s Clubs. Late in her life she wrote Around the World at Eighty (1926), an account of a world tour she took at that age.
Fisher, Dorothy Canfield (1879-1958). American novelist; educational
and social reformer. Dorothy Canfield and Willa Cather became
friends in 1891 at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, where Canfield's
father, James Canfield, had come to serve as Chancellor. The family moved to
Columbus, OH, in 1895 when James Canfield assumed the presidency of Ohio
State University, from which Dorothy graduated in 1899. She then followed
her father to New York City, where he became Librarian of Columbia
University, and she pursued graduate study in Romance Languages at the
University of Paris and Columbia, from which she earned a PhD in 1904. On
Cather’s first trip to Europe, she spent time in France and England with
Canfield, including an awkward visit to the home of poet A.E. Housman.
Cather derived the central character of “The Profile” (1907) from Canfield’s
friend Evelyn Osborne, whom Cather had met in Europe. Cather and Canfield
became estranged for more than a decade because Canfield objected to the
story’s planned inclusion in The Troll Garden (1905).
Canfield married John Redwood Fisher in 1907, and their primary residence
was Arlington, VT. Canfield Fisher had spent 1916-1918 in France engaging in
war relief work, and Cather’s consultation with her about the accuracy of
her depiction of wartime France in One of Ours (1922)
led them to reconcile. In 1925 Canfield Fisher became a founding member of
the Book of the Month Club selection committee. She published her novels
(most of them very popular) under the name Dorothy Canfield but her various
nonfiction works as Dorothy Canfield Fisher.
Canfield, James A. (1874-1959) (“Jim”). American businessman; Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s brother. The only son of James H. Canfield and Flavia Camp Canfield, the younger James Canfield was born in Michigan, then moved with the family to Kansas, then Nebraska, where his father was chancellor of the University of Nebraska from 1891 to 1895; he was Cather’s classmate there. The family moved to Columbus, OH, where Cather visited them in 1898; he had just become engaged to Stella Elliott, another Nebraska alumna, whom he married in 1899 and with whom he had two sons. He owned a wholesale paper business in Westchester County, NY, until his retirement to Florida by 1940. Cather kept in occasional touch with James and Stella Canfield, largely through his younger sister, Dorothy.
Canfield, Stella Elliott (1876-1947). Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s sister-in-law. Born in Nebraska, the daughter of a china dealer, Stella Elliott entered the University of Nebraska with the class of 1898 and was for a time an instructor in the physical education department, then a new field for women. As the younger sister of one of Cather’s classmates, Charles A. Elliott, she may have known Cather at the university. She married James A. Canfield in 1899; they had two sons. She and Cather met occasionally in later years.
Nevin, Ethelbert Woodbridge (1862-1901). American pianist and
composer. Born in Sewickley, PA, near the Edgeworth station in
suburban Pittsburgh, Ethelbert Nevin was the fifth of eight children born to
Robert Peebles Nevin, publisher of the Pittsburgh
Leader, and Elizabeth Duncan Oliphant, an accomplished pianist. He
received musical training at home from his mother and would later study
piano and composition in Boston, MA, Germany, and Italy. In 1888 he married
Anne Paul in Boston, where, for a time, he was established as a performer
and teacher; their son, Paul, was born there the same year. Their daughter,
Dorothy, was born in Berlin in 1892. Nevin achieved success both as a
performer and as a composer of pieces for solo piano, including “Narcissus”
(1891), and songs accompanied by piano, especially “The Rosary” (1897), a
setting for a Robert Cameron Rogers poem. In 1898, financial straits forced
him to move his family to Vineacre, the family estate in Sewickley. At the
time, Willa Cather worked for his father’s newspaper and she already knew
his music; she quickly became his friend, proclaiming herself “prouder of
his friendship than I have ever been of anything” (#0055). She reviewed his
homecoming concert in Pittsburgh and wrote “An Evening at Vineacre” (1899)
for the Lincoln Courier and “The Man Who Wrote
Narcissus” (1900) for the Ladies Home Journal. Nevin
died in in New Haven, CT, where he and his wife had gone to spend the winter
of 1900-1901. He inspired several poems in April
Twilights (1903) and is the prototype for Adriance Hilgarde in “‘A
Death in the Desert’” (1903) and Valentine Ramsay in “Uncle Valentine”
(1925).
Gere, Charles Henry (1838-1904). Newspaper publisher; Cather's
employer during college. Charles H. Gere, born in New York,
graduated from Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA, in 1861 and joined the
Union army. In 1865 he moved to Nebraska, where his family had moved.
Politically active in the Republican Party, he moved to Lincoln, NE, and
founded the city’s first newspaper, the Nebraska State
Journal. He married Mariel E. Clapham of Washington, D.C., in 1871.
While serving as a representative in the first state legislature, he helped
found the University of Nebraska, for which he served as regent from 1882 to
1892. Cather wrote for his newspaper when she was a university student, and
became a friend of Charles and Mariel Gere’s three daughters, Mariel, Ellen,
and Frances. She remembered Charles Gere’s “kindness, his easy wit, the ease
and charm of his personality.”
Gere, Mariel E. Clapham (1838-1912). Cather’s friend; mother of her
friends, the Gere sisters. Mariel Elizabeth Clapham was born in
Washington, D.C., the daughter of Captain John Clapham and Mariel Goodwin
Clapham. She corresponded with Charles Gere for several years before their
marriage in 1871, when she came to Lincoln, NE. When Cather became friends
with their daughters Mariel, Ellen, and Frances, she welcomed her to their
home at 8th and D streets. Mrs. Gere, according to Cather, persuaded her to
grow out her close-cropped hair.
Gere, Ellen Bladen (1875-1941) (“Ned” or “Neddums”). Cather's friend. Ellen Gere, the second daughter of Charles H. and Mariel C. Gere, was born in Lincoln, NE. She visited Cather in Red Cloud, NE, with her sisters, and Cather included her in her correspondence in the 1890s. Ellen Gere entered the University of Nebraska in Lincoln around 1892, but graduated with the class of 1899. In the 1920s she adopted two children, believing, with her friend Dorothy Canfield, that women who wanted to be mothers did not have to be married.
0050
Gere, Frances C. (1877-1965). Cather's friend. Frances Gere,
the youngest child of Charles H. and Mariel C. Gere, was born in Lincoln,
NE. She entered the University of Nebraska in 1894 and graduated in 1898.
Like her sisters, Mariel and Ellen, she joined the Kappa Kappa Gamma
sorority and lived in Lincoln the remainder of her life.
Kipling, Rudyard (1865-1936). English fiction writer and poet.
Born in Bombay, India, to English parents, Kipling was sent to
England for his education but returned to India to work as a journalist. His
poems and short stories about India won him an audience in England, and he
settled in London in 1889. When he married Caroline Balestier in 1892, the
couple moved to her home state of Vermont. In 1896 Willa Cather claimed to
have met Kipling and she described the “46 minutes” of conversation with him
as “alone worth” her move to Pittsburgh to work for the Home Monthly (#0028). In 1899, Cather wrote a column about his
career for the Lincoln Courier, in which she noted
the irony of Kipling trying to “live a respectable Puritan life in Vermont
and be a full-fledged family man,” urging him to “Go back east.” In 1899, he
did leave the U.S., but for London, not India, where he remained the rest of
his life. McClure’s Magazine published Kipling’s poem
“The White Man’s Burden” (1899) and the novel Kim
(1900-1901), paying him $25,000 for serialization of the latter. When Cather
traveled to London on McClure’s business in 1909, she
carried a letter of introduction to him, but it is not clear whether she met
him again there. Throughout her life Cather expressed enthusiasm for
Kipling’s works, which she associated with a spirit of adventure, and her
letters make clear that she followed his life and career closely.
Place Annotations
