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 |
That was a ringing slap you gave me in your more or
less personal column6. I wonder whether you really mean it7, or whether it was for
the benefit of the Red Willow8
contingent? I never even had an idea of disparaging the state. One morning
last Spring I got a letter from just such a woman in Western Nebraska9, that afternoon I happened to go
to a Wagner10 matinee, and the story11 was all worked out before I left the
hall. I simply used the farm house we used to live in and a few of my
recollections of life there. It is so beastyly true that
my own family are quite insulted--they say it isn’t nice to tell such
things.
Now my good friend, how could I have explained that years of prosperity had
followed the pioneer days, and didn’t I take the pains to date the story
back in the pioneer times? A story is but a personal impression, a sort of
mood, anyhow, it isn’t a real estate advertisement nor yet a “roast” for any
particular locality. Perhaps it was a mistake to use the name of an actual
county, I shall change that in the book12
proofs. This is not for publication, nor yet to protest against what you had
to say -- you have said so many agreeable things that I should be a very
thin skinned individual if I pouted. But I should like you to know that I
had no spiteful intentions and did not mean to throw any slurs
cheap slurs upon the state. I
though everyone admitted that those pioneer days were desolate, and I was
misguided enough to think the story a sort of respectfult tribute to the courage of those
uncomplaining women who weathered them. Farm life in that territory when I
knew it fifteen years ago was bad enough, what must it have been before?
I have about decided to delay the publication of the “Troll Garden” until next fall, as we have arranged for serial publication for a number of the stories and they will not be cleared up until then. Maybe it will relieve you to know that the one under discussion is the only Nebraska tale in the lot.
Willa S. Cather Mr. Will Owen Jones1 Nebraska "State Journal"3 Lincoln4 Nebraska PITTSBURG2 MAR 7 1904 Willa Cather. LINCOLN, NEB.4 MAR 9 1904 8—AMInformation about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0095.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0095
- Contents
- Document is one leaf typewritten on recto and verso. Includes one handwritten envelope.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Will Owen Jones 1
- Date letter was written
- March 6, 1904
- Place letter was written
- Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Willa Cather Papers, 1899-1949, in the Clifton Waller Barrett Library (#6494-6494-i), University of Virginia, Special Collections, Charlottesville, VA
Individual Annotations
1180 Murray Hill Avenue (Pittsburgh, PA): Located in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, PA, now part of the Murray Hill Avenue Historic District, 1180 Murray Hill was the home of Judge Samuel A. McClung and his family. Cather lived there at Isabelle McClung’s invitation from 1901 to 1906. She returned there to visit multiple times until 1915, often writing during these visits.
"More or Less Personal" was the title of a daily column in the Nebraska State Journal. The column featured both brief items of social and business news and occasional commentary and analysis, all of which was published anonymously. In a pargraph about "A Wagner Matinée," an anonymous critic wrote that "Miss Cather, like most of the writers who go out from the west, seems to take pleasure in using the forbidding material furnished by the struggles of the pioneers, and does not go to the trouble to even hint at the comfort and wealth that have followed the toil of these early empire builders." Noting that Elia Peattie "never did anything more dismal and hopeless" than Cather's story, the critic complains that "Nobody would gather from reading this piece that the brightest skies in the world hang over Red Willow County, or that the life there is strong, free and hopeful."
Person Annotations
Jones, Will Owen (1862-1928). Newspaper editor. Will
Owen Jones was born in Wisconsin and came to Nebraska by 1880. He worked for
the Nebraska State Journal while attending the
University of Nebraska in Lincoln, graduating in 1886. That year he became
city editor of the paper, then associate editor in 1889 (the year he married
pianist Edith M. Doolittle), and then managing editor in 1892. He was close
to Charles and Mariel Gere, the owners of the Nebraska
State Journal, and the Jones’s only child, Mariel Jones, was named
for Mrs. Gere. Cather took his journalism course at the university in 1893
and wrote to him often early in her career, although he could be severe in
his criticism of some of her work.
Wagner, Richard (1813-1883). German composer. Richard Wagner
was born in Leipzig, Germany. He taught himself to play the piano and the
principles of composition, partly by studying the scores of Beethoven's
works, and was also deeply influenced by his reading of Shakespeare,
Schiller, and Goethe. His early operas before Rienzi
(1842) were unsuccessful. In the wake of its success he began to develop his
more characteristic style. Although The Flying
Dutchman (1843), Tannhäuser (1845), and Lohengrin (1850) were popular, critics were often
hostile, and his involvement with the Revolution of 1848 in Germany forced
him to flee into exile in Zurich, where he wrote on social and musical
issues, and composed the poem, The Ring of the
Nibelung, upon which his four Ring operas were based. The
difficulty of staging these titanic works led him to put them aside for such
works as Tristan and Isolde (1859). His financial
difficulties were alleviated when Ludvig II of Bavaria became his patron.
Wagner toured Europe to raise money for a new kind of theater at Bayreuth,
which would be capable of presenting the Ring; the
work was first given in its entirety at Bayreuth in 1876. His last work was
Parsifal (1882). Cather was an avid opera fan,
and references to his works appear throughout her works, most prominently “A
Wagner Matinee” (1904) and The Song of the Lark
(1915). She recommended Wagner’s autobiography My
Life to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, praising it as “all action”
(#0219), and wrote a preface for a 1925 edition of Gertrude Hall’s Wagnerian Romances (1925).
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
Nebraska State Journal
"More or Less Personal," Nebraska State Journal (February 26, 1904)
"A Wagner Matinée," Everybody's Magazine ( March 1904) by Willa Cather
The Troll Garden (1905) by Willa Cather
