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 |
I am just back from a two weeks driving trip up in the French and Bohemian country5—all day on the road or in the thrashing fields with the thermometer often up to 110 and never lower than 90. It was all very fine, but one had to go a stiff pace. I saw many old friends and many places that I often get hungry for. Only the intense heat drove me home at last. I would like to have gone 2 on for two weeks more. All those people are like characters in a book to me. I began their story when I was little and it goes on like “War and Peace,”6 always rich and various, always so much stranger than any invention of man. Whenever I go back there there is so much to catch up with. I have some friends up there who save all the details for me, of all that happens in my absence.
I suppose it’s been hot every where, and you seem not to have escaped. I’m not
working at all. It was not my plan to work any out here. It’s a waste of time to write when there’s so much doing. If you go
abroad in the September—but you can’t, now,
certainly, with the Kaiser7 in this high Napoleonic mood8. You’ll simply have
to stay at home, and maybe that will be good for you!
I’m not much interested in “letters” just now, but I suppose I shall be when I go back in the fall. Let me hear what you are going to do in case you cannot go abroad. I expect to fall to work in Pittsburgh9 about a month from now. Fremstad10 is working hard and firing one cook after another. What a woman she is to look for trouble. Peace is where she is not, and yet it is peace that she’s always looking for. May you have cool weather by this time, and good energy.
With my heartiest greetings W. S. C. Miss Elizabeth Sergeant1 c/o Mrs. Broe3 St. Huberts4Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0285.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0285
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto and verso. Includes one handwritten envelope.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant1
- Date letter was written
- August 10 [1914]
- Place letter was written
- Red Cloud, Nebraska, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Literary and Historical Manuscripts (MA 1602), Morgan Library and Museum, New York, NY
Individual Annotations
French-Canadians settled in an area northwest of Red Cloud, NE, near the community of Campbell, and Czechs largely settled just north of Red Cloud.
During the first days of August 1914, shortly after Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, Germany declared war on Russia and then France, which provoked a series of war declarations by several countries and the beginning of World War I.
Person Annotations
Sergeant, Elizabeth Shepley (1881-1965). American journalist and
author. Born and raised in Winchester, MA, a suburb of Boston,
Elizabeth Sergeant graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1903. In 1910,
Pauline Goldmark sent her to Cather at McClure’s
Magazine with a proposed article, published as “Toilers of the
Tenements,” and Cather and Sergeant became lifelong friends. In 1914
Sergeant became one of the original contributors to the New Republic. While on assignment in France in 1917 she was
injured by a land mine; her injury and recuperation were the subject of Shadow-Shapes: Journal of a Wounded Woman (1920). She
moved to New Mexico in 1920 and became involved with the Taos artists colony
and advocated for Native American rights, but her work frequently took her
back to New York City. She included Cather in her collection of portraits of
prominent Americans, Fire under the Andes (1927).
Sergeant studied with Carl Jung and Toni Woolf in Zurich, Switzerland, from
1929 to 1931. When she returned to the U.S. she sold her house in New Mexico
and settled in New York City, writing many magazine articles about authors
and psychological topics. She later moved to Rockland County, NY. Cather’s
letters to Sergeant comment frequently on both her own and Sergeant’s
writing and testify to a strong and lively friendship maintained despite
Sergeant's being a committed reformer and far to the left of Cather
politically and culturally. Sergeant’s Willa Cather: A
Memoir (1953) includes extensive paraphrases of Cather’s letters to
her.
Broe, Mrs. There is insufficient evidence for a definitive identification, but this may be Margaret Louise Broe (1875-1920), who married farmer Charles Robert Broe, of Keene Valley, Essex County, NY, around 1903; they had three sons. Cather addressed a letter to Elizabeth Sergeant in care of Mrs. Broe at St. Hubert’s, a hamlet that is part of Keene, a town in the Adirondack mountains with many summer visitors.
Wilhelm II (1859-1941). German Kaiser and King of Prussia.
Wilhelm II came into power in 1888 and was widely blamed for the
outbreak of WWI. Although Wilhelm had built up German naval forces, he only
declared war on Russia after pressured to do so by his generals. Following
the war, Wilhelm was forced to abdicate and spent the rest of his life
exiled to the Netherlands.
Fremstad, Olive (1871-1951). Swedish-American opera singer.
Born in Sweden, Ann Olivia Rundquist was adopted by a
Scandinavian-American couple, the Fremstads, who raised her first in
Kristiania (now Oslo), Norway, and then in Minnesota. She moved to New York
City to study piano in 1890 and then to Germany to study voice with Lilli
Lehmann. After a successful career in Europe as a mezzo-soprano, she made
her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in 1903, where she specialized in
singing soprano roles in operas by Richard Wagner. Willa Cather first met
Fremstad in 1913 while researching “Three American Singers,” an article for
McClure’s Magazine in which Cather clearly
prefers Fremstad as “the most interesting kind of American” over Geraldine
Farrar and Louise Homer. Through 1916 Cather and Fremstad were in close and
regular contact in person and through letters, although Cather’s letters to
Fremstad have not been located and their friendship evidently cooled.
Fremstad inspired many aspects of the story, personality, and career of Thea
Kronborg, heroine of The Song of the Lark (1915), and
she approved of the novel, although Cather did not want readers to identify
the character too closely with her. Fremstad married and divorced twice.
During the period Cather and Fremstad were in regular contact Fremstad lived
as a couple with Mary Watkins (later Cushing) who, after Fremstad’s death,
published a biography of her, The Rainbow Bridge
(1954).
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
War and Peace (1869) by Leo Tolstoy
