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 |
44-60 EAST TWENTY-THIRD STREET,
NEW YORK. Number 5 Bank Street3 New York2 February 23, 1913 Dear Aunt Franc1:
It has been a long while since I got your good letter, but this has been a
busy fall and winter for me. I have just finished a new novel5 which will be published in the
fall, and I have been doing a great deal of magazine work. Besides these
things, I have had the care of getting settled in a new apartment in
New York. I did not move in to my new flat until the first of January, but I
came on in October from Pittsburgh6
and leased the place and moved my furniture in. Then I went back to
Pittsburgh to work on my story in peace and quiet. At last I have an
apartment that is roomy, quiet, and that suits me perfectly. When I came
back in January the first month was given over to paperers and painters and
furniture dealers. I actually had to write an
article7 for the March number of McClures8 while the floors were being painted under my feet.
But I have taken a good deal of pleasure in fixing the place up, for it is
exactly the kind of apartment I have always wanted, and I had almost
despaired of ever being able to find one that would suit me for a reasonable
rental. I have the competent colored
girl9 who has been my maid for four years, and she tyrannizes over
me— and makes me very comfortable. I have never before been so
happy and comfortable as I am this winter. Probably one reason is that, for
the first time in several years, I am perfectly well—well enough to
enjoy everything, work and play alike. My office work I have cut exactly in
half, and this gives me much more time to write—and to live, for that
matter. I wish you and Bessie10 and
Auntie Sister11 could see my new
flat. What do you think of two open fires, one in the dining room and one in
the sittingroom? McCLURE'S MAGAZINE,
44-60
EAST TWENTY-THIRD STREET,
NEW YORK.I have a snug little study
off the sittingroom and a comfortable bedroom and bath, a large dining room
and a good kitchen. Plenty of sunlight in the two front front rooms. I now own four very beautiful Persian rugs, of
which I am very proud.
Yes, my dear Aunt, I know there was a sort of moral flimsiness about "Alexander."12 But writing is a queer business. If one does anything that is sharp and keen enough to go over the line, to get itself with the work that is taken seriously, one has to have had either an unusual knowledge of or a peculiar sympathy with the characters one handles. One can't write about what one most admires always—you must, be some accident, have seen into your character very deeply, and it is this accident of intense realization of him that gives your writing about him tone and distinction, that lifts it above the commonplace, in other words. Now there are three people, two men and one woman, whom I admire more than I do any other people, and about whom I feel very strongly. More than once I have tried to put these people, about whom I feel so keenly, into stories. I assure you, the result was a blow to pride—the stories, when I had finished them, sounded as if A. C. Hosmer13 might have written them, they were that commonplace. They were just like hundreds of other stories. Why, you ask? My dear Aunt, I don't know. I only wish I did! But, to be worth anything, a story must have a flavor entirely its own. And often one can't reach that point of differentiation with the subjects one would most love to handle. Maybe there's a weakness in me that makes me able to handle the weak people better —I don't know. Alexander has already gone through two editions14 in England15, and the royalties16 are coming up to a nice little figure. The new novel is twice as long as Alexander and is much, much better. I'm almost sure you will like the heroine17.
McCLURE'S MAGAZINE,44-60 EAST TWENTY-THIRD STREET,
NEW YORK.
Bessie wrote me about G. P.18's hunting
trip. Please congratulate him for me. Elsie19 is so happy in her teaching. She loves the place and
the work and the people. I am so glad. You were well when Bessie last wrote,
and I hope you are now, my dear Aunt. Your niece would like to drop down for
a day with you before this short month is over. I found such satisfaction in
the time we had together last summer. One of the pleasures of getting
older is that one can get so much nearer to one's own people, and that the
dear ones of them become dearer all the time. I always used to be a little
afraid of my grown-up relatives as a child. I felt as if all of them, even
father20, wanted to make me over,
and I didn't want to be made over—oh,
not a bit! It's worth nearing forty to have got rid of all those queer fears
and shynesses that I used to feel with my own people—less with you and
father, I think, than with any of the others,
but still I was always a little nervous. For the last five or six years it
has been such a pleasure to me to go back and find that all gone, to feel
not a bit afraid, and to feel sure that where you did not agree with me you
would give me the benefit of the doubt, and that people can be very fond of
each other even if they cannot always thing
think alike.
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0254.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0254
- Contents
- Document is three leaves, handwritten on recto and verso of each leaf. Includes one envelope, handwritten.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Frances Smith Cather1
- Date letter was written
- February 23, 1913
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- George Ray Cather Collection (MS113), University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries, Archives & Special Collections, Lincoln, NE
Individual Annotations
5 Bank Street (New York City): The apartment Cather shared with Edith Lewis beginning in 1912, located in Greenwich Village in the Manhattan borough of New York City. Subway construction forced Cather and Lewis to relocate in 1927.
Little information exists about many of the women Cather and Lewis hired to help them with domestic work in their home.
The first British edition of Alexander's Bridge, titled Alexander's Bridges, was published in London by Heinemann in August 1912. No other British edition was published by 1913.
Cather's contract with Houghton Mifflin, dated 1 December 1911, provided for a 10 percent royalty on the first 3,000 copies sold at trade-list retail, and rose to a 15 percent royality on copies sold above 5,000. The novel was printed in January of 1912, for a first impression of 2,270 sets. A second printing of 3,000 sets was completed before the second edition was published in 1922.
Alexandra Bergson is the central protagonist of O Pioneers! (1913).
Person Annotations
Cather, Frances Amanda Smith (1845-1922) (“Franc”). Cather’s
aunt. Born in Boston, MA, Franc graduated from Mount Holyoke
Female Seminary in South Hadley, MA, in 1870. Franc worked both as a private
tutor and as a teacher at Winchester Female Institute in Winchester, VA. In
1873 she and George Cather married and moved to Webster County in Nebraska,
where they raised their five children—Grosvenor, Blanche, Carrie, and
twins Frank and Oscar. Willa and Franc Cather maintained a warm relationship
and were regular correspondents until Franc’s death, exchanging letters
about family matters and about Willa’s writing. Elements of the life of her
New-England-born aunt inspired the character Aunt Georgiana in Willa
Cather’s story “A Wagner Matinee” (1904), and Franc’s son Grosvenor was the
prototype for Claude Wheeler in One of Ours (1922),
making Frances the prototype for Claude’s mother, Evangeline Wheeler.
Seymour, Elizabeth (c. 1859-1934) (“Bess,” “Bessie”). Cather’s
cousin. Bess Seymour was born in Virginia to Sarah Boak (the
elder sister of Willa Cather’s mother) and her first husband, Joseph D.
Seymour. In 1883, Bess moved with Willa Cather’s family to Webster County,
NE. Seymour lived in the Cather family home from 1883 to 1904, when she
moved to the Webster County farm of her half brother, Will Andrews. Cather
used her cousin’s name as a byline for the story “The Burglar’s Christmas”
(1906), and it has been suggested that she served as a model for Aunt Tillie
in The Song of the Lark (1915). Cather frequently
mentions in letters to other family members that she received long letters
from Seymour full of family news, and she urged her sister Elsie Cather to
care for Seymour during her final illness and sent money to pay medical
expenses.
Andrews, Sarah Ellen Boak Seymour (1834-1925) (“Auntie”). Cather’s aunt. Sarah Boak, the elder sister of Cather’s mother, was born in Virginia. She married Joseph D. Seymour in 1857, and they were parents of Elizabeth (Bess). After Sarah’s first husband died in 1861, she married Joseph Andrews in 1862 and gave birth to four more children, William, Katie, Nannie, and a daughter who died in infancy. In 1908, after her second husband died, Sarah moved to Webster County, NE, to live with Will (Nannie had also relocated there). References to her appear frequently in Cather family correspondence, especially when she was elderly and in poor health.
Hosmer, Alfred C. (1855-after 1916) (“A.C”). Nebraska newspaper editor. Born in Ohio, Alfred C. Hosmer married Alice Phares in 1875; they had two children. The family came to Webster County, NE, from Illinois; in 1883 A. C. Hosmer bought the Red Cloud Chief newspaper. Later in the 1880s, political differences led the Chief to attack Charles F. Cather, Dr. Gilbert McKeeby, and other associates as members of the “Big 8” trying to control city affairs. In the 1890s Hosmer sold the Chief and moved to Kansas to run the Nebraska and Kansas Farmer. He returned to Red Cloud in 1902 and established the Commercial Advertiser, selling it in 1916, when the family left Red Cloud.
Cather, Grosvenor Perry (1883-1918) (“G.P.”). Cather’s cousin.
G.P. Cather was born in Catherton, NE, the oldest son of Frances and
George Cather. He attended Grand Island Baptist College and the University
of Nebraska in Lincoln but was a poor student and did not earn a degree. He
married his childhood friend Myrtle Bartlett in 1910. Restless and
unsuccessful both before and after his marriage, he joined the Nebraska
National Guard in 1914 and served under General John J. Pershing on the
Mexican border in 1916. He became a member of the Allied Expeditionary Force
in 1917 and was commissioned as a second lieutenant. He died in action in
Cantigny, France, on May 28 and was posthumously awarded the Distinguished
Service Cross and the Croix de Guerre. Willa Cather read his letters home to
his mother about his experiences in the army, and she modeled Claude
Wheeler, the protagonist of One of Ours (1922), on
G.P. His body was first buried in a military cemetery in France, where
Cather visited his grave in 1920. In 1921, a large military funeral marked
the reinterment of his remains in Bladen, NE.
Cather, Elsie Margaret (1890-1964) (“Bobbie”). Cather’s
sister. Born in Red Cloud, NE, shortly before Willa Cather
graduated from high school, Elsie attended the University of Nebraska in
Lincoln from 1908 to 1910, before transferring to Smith College, in
Northampton, MA, from which she graduated with an A.B. in English and Latin
in 1912. She undertook graduate study at the University of Nebraska in 1914
and in 1916 received her A.M. with a major in philosophy and a minor in
English. At both the undergraduate and the graduate level at Nebraska, she
studied under Louise Pound. She began a career in high school teaching in
1912, when she took a position in Lander, WY, where her brother Roscoe then
lived with his family. She also taught in Albuquerque, NM; Corning, IA;
Cleveland, OH; and briefly Red Cloud, when illness in the family brought her
home. Her longest tenure as a teacher was at Lincoln (NE) High School, where
she began teaching in 1920, with Olivia Pound and Mariel Gere as colleagues.
Willa Cather's expectation that Elsie be responsible for aging family and
friends and for legal affairs after their parents' deaths sometimes brought
the sisters into conflict. Elsie Cather retired from Lincoln High School in
1942. She died in Lincoln.
Cather, Charles Fectigue (1848-1928). Cather’s father.
Charles Fectigue (possibly Fectique) Cather was born in the Back
Creek Valley of Virginia, north of Winchester. His family were sheep raisers
who were largely, but not entirely, Union supporters during the Civil War.
He married Mary Virginia Seibert Boak, daughter of Confederate supporters,
in 1872. In 1883 he and his family followed his parents, William and
Caroline Cather, and brother George to Webster County in Nebraska, where
various cousins and uncles had also settled. Initially he ran a ranch in the
county but soon moved his family into the town of Red Cloud, where he had an
insurance and real estate business. Four of his children, Willa, Roscoe,
Charles, and Jessica, were born in Virginia, while three, James, Elsie, and
John, were born in Nebraska. Cather’s relationship with her father was very
warm: she made regular visits to her parents in Red Cloud and especially
enjoyed her father’s letters expressing appreciation of her novels. A week
after she concluded a visit to her ailing father in Red Cloud, he died of
heart disease. He served as the prototype for Hillary Templeton in “Old Mrs.
Harris” (1932).
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
O Pioneers! (1913) by Willa Cather
"Plays of Real Life," McClure's Magazine (March 1913) by Willa Cather
McClure's Magazine
Alexander's Bridge (1912) by Willa Cather
