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 |
Yesterday at noon I learned of the bitter
loss3 that has come to us all and to you more than to anyone else. I think
you will know better than I can tell you how constantly my thoughts have been with
you since then. This city, and my walking about the streets of it, seem very much
like a dream when my heart is straining over-sea to you and to her4 who loved you so well through so many years.
For I cannot bring myself to feel but that somehow she
is there near you, and that if I could go to you today I would feel her presence
even if I could not see her, as I felt it when I went to see you when she was ill first ill in the winter. When one is far away
like this one cannot realize death. Other things become shadowy and unreal, but Miss
Jewett herself remains so real that I cannot get past the vivid image of her to any
other realization. I know that something has happened only by the numbness and
inertia that have come over me. I find that everything I have been doing and
undertaking over here I havedone with a hope that it might interest her—even to some clothes I was
having made. And now all the wheels stand still and the ways of life seem very dark
and purposeless. There is only one thing that seems worth hoping or wishing for, and
that is that you and Miss Mary5 are finding
strength and comfort from some source I do not know of, for I know that Miss
Jewett's first care and anxiety would have been for you. She was always so afraid
of
losing you, so afraid, as she told me at Manchester6 last summer, "that her life might be blown away from her
without warning."
I shall sail for home some time next week, as soon as I can get a boat, and I can hardly expect to hear news of you from anyone until then. I shall let you know as soon as I land in New York7. If there is anything, little or big, that I can do, if there should be anything which I could attend to for you, or any way in which I could lighten your loneliness, it would help me more than anything else in the world could and give me deeper pleasure.
Dear Mrs. Fields, one cant speak or write what I want to say to you, for nobody's heart can ever speak. Let me love and sorrow with you, and think of me sometimes when you are thinking of Miss Jewett. I could never tell you, I cannot even tell myself, how dear you both are to me.
WillaInformation about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0162.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0162
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto and verso.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Annie Adams Fields1
- Date letter was written
- June 27, 1909
- Place letter was written
- London, Greater London, England2
- Location of original letter
- Sarah Orne Jewett Correspondence (MS AM 1743), Harvard University, Houghton Library, Cambridge, MA
Individual Annotations
Sarah Orne Jewett died on 24 June 1909.
Person Annotations
Fields, Annie Adams (1835-1915). Literary hostess, author, and social
reformer. At age 20, Annie Adams married James T. Fields,
partner in the Boston publishing house of Ticknor & Fields. Both before
and after her husband’s death in 1881, Fields often entertained important
American, British, and European authors at her home at 148 Charles Street in
Boston, MA. After James’ death, Sarah Orne Jewett, whose books were
published by Ticknor & Fields, began sharing Annie’s homes at 148
Charles Street and Manchester-on-the-Sea, MA. Cather met Fields in Boston in
1908, a meeting Cather described in "The House on Charles Street," an essay
reviewing Memories of a Hostess (a volume of
selections from Fields' journals, 1922). A revised version of this essay,
retitled "148 Charles Street," appeared in Not Under
Forty (1936). After Jewett’s death in 1909, Fields edited The Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett (1911), which
included several letters to Cather. Fearing that 148 Charles Street would
become a museum after her death, Fields requested that it be torn down.
Jewett, Sarah Orne (1849-1909). American short story writer and
novelist. Born in South Berwick, ME, Jewett began sharing homes
in Boston (at 148 Charles Street) and Manchester-on-the-Sea, MA, with Annie
Adams Fields in 1881, while continuing to live in her family home in South
Berwick with her mother and sister part of the year. She was associated
throughout her career with the Atlantic Monthly, and
her best-known work, The Country of the Pointed Firs,
was serialized there in 1896. Like much of her fiction, it focused on rural
and small town New England life. By the time Cather met Jewett at 148
Charles Street in 1908, Jewett had largely ceased writing because of a
spinal concussion she suffered in a 1902 carriage accident. She wrote
important letters of advice to Cather in 1908, criticizing her decision to
write "The Gull's Road" (1908) from the perspective of a male character,
which she called "something of a masquerade" (27 Nov. 1908), and urging her
to give up her editorial work at McClure's Magazine
so she could focus full-time on fiction writing (13 Dec. 1908). After
Jewett's death in South Berwick in 1909, Cather often referred to her and
her advice about writing. Cather edited The Best Stories
of Sarah Orne Jewett (1925) for publisher Houghton Mifflin, and in
her preface classed The Country of the Pointed Firs
with Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Nathaniel
Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter as one of "three
American books which have the possibility of a long, long life."
Jewett, Mary Rice (1847-1930). Sarah Orne Jewett’s sister. Born in Exeter, NH, to Dr. Theodore Herman Jewett and Caroline Frances Perry Jewett, Mary was the older sister of Sarah Orne Jewett. They both attended Berwick Academy in Berwick, ME, and as adults they continued to live together in the family home in South Berwick, where Mary was active in a local women’s club and charitable work. On Sarah’s death, Mary and Annie Adams Fields became co-executors of Sarah’s literary estate. Cather’s friendship with Mary seems to date primarily from this period after Sarah’s death, and Cather made several visits to Mary at the Jewett family home in Maine. In 1924, with Mary Jewett’s approval, Ferris Greenslet of Houghton Mifflin asked Cather to select and write an introduction to Sarah Jewett’s stories. Shortly thereafter, Burton Rascoe reported critical remarks by Cather about Sarah Jewett’s works and the Jewett family in his “Bookman’s Day Book” column in the New York Tribune. Mary read these remarks as reprinted in the Boston Transcript, was offended, and sought to have Cather removed as editor of her sister’s works. However, Cather and Greenslet persuaded her to reverse this decision (Cather’s letters pleading her case have not been located). Mary Jewett died in South Berwick, and her nephew Theodore Jewett Eastman succeeded to the executorship of Sarah Jewett’s literary estate.
Place Annotations
