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 |
Elsie5 spent her Christmas and Easter vacations with me. She is in excellent condition and seems to enjoy her work at Northampton6. She does not get nearly so much out of the English Literature, however, as she did under you, and she is really very appreciative of the help you gave her. I am so glad that she had enough work under you to get well started, and I only wish she could have had more. Perhaps she can do some postgraduate work under you. She would love that. I do think we had a pretty sane attitude about the immortals when we went to school.
Are you coming east this summer I wonder? Please let me know if you do. I
shall probably be here until the first of August. I’ll love to see you. Of
course you like Arnold Bennett7, don’t
you? He’s too fond of "symptoms" maybe, but af at least he seems to have some goods to sell, which most of
'em emphatically have not, even when their salesmanship is most impressive
and their floor-walking manners very grand.
Does Miss Lathrop8 ever come to New York? Please tell her I want to see her.
Miss Louise Pound1 1429 "L" Street Lincoln3 Nebraska NEW YORK, N.Y.STA.O2 MAY 9 1911 730 LINCOLN, NEB.3 MAY 11 1911 11 AMInformation about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0190.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0190
- Contents
- Document is two leaves, handwritten on recto only of first leaf and on recto and verso of second leaf. Includes one handwritten envelope.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Louise Pound 1
- Date letter was written
- May 9, 1911
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, 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
82 Washington Place (New York City): Cather's second apartment in New York City and the first one she shared with Edith Lewis, located in Greenwich Village in the Manhattan borough. Cather and Lewis lived here from 1908 to 1911.
Person Annotations
Pound, Louise (1872-1958). American folklorist and university
professor. Pound and Cather met when both were students at the
University of Nebraska in Lincoln, where Cather also knew Louise’s brother
Roscoe and sister Olivia. Cather was deeply infatuated with Louise, who was
both an outstanding student and an accomplished multi-sport athlete. Pound
visited Cather in Red Cloud, NE, several times, but she apparently did not
reciprocate Cather’s intense affection, and Cather’s lampoon of Roscoe Pound
in “Pastels in Prose” (1894) caused a rift between the two women. Pound
earned a BA from Nebraska in 1892, an MA in 1895, and a PhD from the
University of Heidelberg in 1900. She was a professor in the English
department at the University of Nebraska, where she taught Cather's sister
Elsie, until 1945. From 1954-55 she served as the first female president of
the Modern Language Association.
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.
Bennett, Arnold (1867-1931). British novelist and playwright. Born in Staffordshire, England, Arnold Bennett worked as a clerk for his father, a solicitor, until moving to London in 1889 to pursue a literary career. He moved to Paris in 1903 and in 1907 married French actress Marguerite Soulié. Bennett was deeply influenced by the French realist novelists and is best known for writing realist novels set in Staffordshire. Bennett also had considerable success as a playwright, having five plays produced on the London stage from 1908 to 1913. Cather wrote approvingly of his co-authored play Milestones in “Plays of Real Life” (McClure’s March 1913), noting its overlapping theme with his novel The Old Wives’ Tale (1913).
Lathrop, Susan Adele (1875-1956) (“Adele”). American educator; Cather’s acquaintance. Born in Connecticut, Adele Lathrop accompanied Willa Cather’s friend Louise Pound on a trip to Europe around 1900. Lathrop then visited Pound in Lincoln, NE, in 1901, and entered the University of Nebraska, graduating in 1904. In 1908, having received her M. A. from Wellesley College, she was appointed instructor in English at Wellesley. In 1911 she became assistant principal of Dana Hall, a preparatory school for girls in Wellesley, and from 1916 to 1928 served as the second president of Pine Manor Junior College, which had been established in 1911 as a post-graduate division of Dana Hall. Lathrop traveled frequently to Europe until late in the 1930s. In 1902, Lathrop was in London, England, and showed Willa Cather and Isabelle McClung around the city.
Place Annotations
