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 |
This time the candy came straight to the mark, and I've now been nibbling at it for three days with the greatest possible comfort. And there is still lots and lots of it left, you sent such a big box. I have had a great deal of fun out of that box.
One of the Hull House5 women came
to the office yesterday. She said that Miss Wyatt6 has given herself over wholly to
the cause of the White Slave7;
that she never talks or thinks about anything else, and feels pretty
bitterly toward those of us here who didn't sympathize with her. I'm sorry.
I've seldome been more disappointed than I was when I found that we had no
possible point of contact. She seems to me to be maddened by having lived to long in the company of a horrible idea—like Electra8. She used to frighten me. Her eyes seemed
to burn with a rage to destroy the germ which
replenishes the race. I cant chat comfortably with people who are panting for the destruction
of anything. Would that she could forget it all, and begin to be touched by
the amusing traits of human nature again! Oh I must tell you; she says that the ones who go back to it are the
most wronged slaves of all for they have been
made the slaves of an appetite! Aren't we all?, Even Miss Wyatt and Cassandra9, the slaves of some
taste or other?
Miss McClung10 arrives Tuesday, and I hope we shall be seeing Miss Goldmark11 within the next week. I wish you could be here. I awfully want Isabelle to know you, and you'd like her. She's so fond of lovely things and so full of them, and so frightened of reformers.
Thanks a million million times for everything. And I'm so glad you got in to have tea with me!
Faithfully Willa Cather Miss Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant1 4 Hawthorne Road Brookline3 Mass. NEW YORK, N. Y. STA.D2 JUN 4 1911 10-PMInformation about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0195.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0195
- 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
- [June 4, 1911]
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Literary and Historical Manuscripts (MA 1602), Morgan Library and Museum, New York, NY
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.
Founded in Chicago in 1889 by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, Hull-House was one of the first social settlements, often called settlement houses, dedicated to broad-based support of neighborhood life, including health, education, labor, and culture.
The sale and exploitation of young white women by sex traffickers. McClure's published George Kibbe Turner's "The Daughters of the Poor," subtitled "A Plain Story of the Development of New York City as a Leading Center of the White Slave Trade of the World, Under Tammany Hall," in its November 1909 issue.
The Greek mythological figure Electra, whose story was dramatized by a range of classical and modern writers, plotted with her brother Orestes to murder their mother Clytemnestra and her husband Aegisthus in revenge for the killing of their father Agamemnon.
The Greek mythological figure Cassandra was cursed by the god Apollo to see the future but never to have her prophecies believed. A princess of Troy, she was taken by Agamemnon after his victory there, only to be murdered with him by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. Agamemnon and Clytemnestra were the parents of Electra, mentioned above.
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.
Wyatt, Edith Franklin (1873-1958). American author, critic, and social reformer. Born in Tomah, WI, Edith Wyatt attended Bryn Mawr College from 1892-1894 and taught for several years before devoting herself to writing about Chicago, IL, where she lived most of her life. William Dean Howells championed her Three Stories of Contemporary Chicago (1900), and she was one of the founders of Poetry magazine. However, when she moved into Hull House in Chicago, she turned her focus primarily to writing investigative pieces for magazines and newspapers to promote progressive social reform. In 1910 as managing editor of McClure’s Magazine Cather commissioned her to write articles about the Cherry Mine disaster in Illinois and with Susan Ainslie Clark an article about the economic circumstances of women working in New York shirtwaist factories. By 1911, however, Cather had become tired of Wyatt’s obsession with the “the cause of the White Slave” (prostitutes) and found “no possible point of contact” with her (#0195). Wyatt died in Chicago.
Hambourg, Isabelle McClung (1877-1938). Cather’s longtime
friend. Cather met Isabelle McClung, the daughter of a socially
prominent, Pittsburgh (PA) family, in 1899 in the dressing room of actress
Lizzie Hudson Collier. McClung seems to have been the first woman to
reciprocate Cather’s romantic affections. In 1901, McClung invited Cather to
live in her family’s large home in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of
Pittsburgh. She and Cather traveled together to Europe in 1902, and McClung
accompanied Cather on a visit home to Nebraska in 1905. After Cather moved
to New York City in 1906, she frequently visited McClung in Pittsburgh,
finding the familiar house a congenial place to write, and McClung visited
New York City, staying with Cather and Edith Lewis. Cather and McClung also
rented a vacation cabin in Cherry Valley, NY, in 1911, and traveled together
to Virginia in 1913. In late 1915, shortly after the death of her father,
Judge Samuel McClung, Isabelle announced her intention to marry violinist
Jan Hambourg. Cather reacted negatively to the marriage (which took place in
1916) but eventually reconciled herself to it, enjoying long visits with the
Hambourgs in Toronto, Ontario, in 1921 and France in 1923 and 1935. Cather
and Edith Lewis also spent time with the Hambourgs in Paris is 1930 and
1935. The latter trip occurred after Isabelle sought treatment in the U.S.
for the kidney disease that killed her several years later in Italy. Her
death came only four months after Cather’s brother Douglass died, leaving
her feeling bereft. “No other living person cared as much about my work,
through thirty-eight years,” she wrote her brother Roscoe (#2137). After
Isabelle’s death, Jan sent to Cather the six hundred letters from Cather to
Isabelle in his possession, and Cather destroyed them, although a few
letters from Isabelle and Cather postcards to Isabelle are extant.
Goldmark, Pauline Dorothea (1874-1962). American social reformer.
Born in Brooklyn, NY, to Polish and Czech Jewish parents whose
families fled Austria after the Revolution of 1848, Goldmark earned a BA in
biology from Bryn Mawr College in 1896. While studying two additional years
at Barnard College she volunteered with the New York State chapter of the
National Consumers League (NCL), and sociological research and reform became
her life’s work, in which she also enlisted her sister Josephine. Cather met
Pauline Goldmark and her sisters Josephine and Alice (who married Louis D.
Brandeis and lived in Boston) when she was on assignment in Boston for McClure’s Magazine in 1907-1908. Pauline Goldmark and
Cather became lifelong friends, although extant correspondence is sparse. In
1910, Pauline sent Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant to Cather with a proposed
article based on NCL research, and she was also instrumental in placing a
series of widely-noticed McClure’s articles by Susan
Ainslie Clark on working girls and women based in New York City similarly
based on NCL research. In later years she and her sister Josephine lived
together in Hartsdale, NY, where Pauline died.
Place Annotations
