Guide to Reading Letter Transcriptions
Some of these features are only visible when "plain text" is off.
| 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 |
"KAISER WILHELM DER GROSSE" NORDDEUTSCHER LLOYD
BREMEN. July 13 Dear Mrs. Fields1;
Your letter3 reached me on Monday and I first had the news of Miss Jewett4's death on Saturday. You will never know what a kind thing you did in writing to me. I carried your letter about with me for the comfort it gave me. And I was so touched by your taking thought of me at such a time, all this lonely way home my mind has dwelt upon the peaceful picture you gave me of Miss Jewett; and later you will tell me more of her. When I think of you at Manchester5, in the first flash I always see her there, too, as I saw you together last year. And very often at night I dream that you are both there together. Perhaps you are. It seems to me that she cannot be very far away from you.
There is a heavy sea and writing is difficult. You will know when you get this that I have landed in New York6. I pray and hope that all is well with you. You will let me have some word of you soon, will you not? And from my heart I thank you for that last letter you wrote me after you left South Berwick7—which seemed to bring me so close to the one we loved.
Devotedly WillaInformation about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0163.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0163
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto and verso.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Annie Adams Fields1
- Date letter was written
- July 13 [1909]
- Explanation of conjectured date
-
The year of this letters is established by Sarah Orne Jewett's death on June 24, 1909.
- Place letter was written
- Atlantic Ocean2
- Location of original letter
- Sarah Orne Jewett Correspondence (MS AM 1743), Harvard University, Houghton Library, Cambridge, MA
Individual Annotations
Cather had already written to Fields about Sarah Orne Jewett's death on 27 June 1909 (#0162).
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."
Place Annotations
