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 |
I have been travelling and missing my letters and the have only just heard of your dear mother’s5 death. It is very hard for me to believe that she
is not with you anymore. I cannot realize that she is not there, just the
same as she used to be, with all her force and kindness and dignity and keen
understanding of life, that was tempered by so much charity and such a rich
sense of humor. I can hear her little laugh now, the 2one she
was so apt to laugh when young people were talking large or taking
themselves too seriously. How much more good that laugh did one than any
amount of scolding. It was so wise and kind that for the moment it made one
wiser too. How much I owe her; and I am only one of many. I always loved her
very dearly, even when I was too young to be willing to show that I did. And
I always really wanted to please her, even when I was too silly to want to
show that, either. I don’t believe anyone but your mother could ever have
persuaded me to let my hair
grow6 or to try to learn to spell. I remember, as 3distinctly as if it were
yesterday, the first time you took me home to dinner, when I was a preparatory student7, and how
your mother knew just what tack to take with me, and how kind your father’s8 eyes were when he looked me
over and said I looked like “Sadie
Harris9.” I can’t believe it was so long ago. I hope you and I
can keep half the gallant spirit your mother did, and the splendid love of
life and pleasure in people. I cannot think of her except as living as
richly and vigorously as 4she did in the years when she
was so kind to me—when she did so much for a clumsy country child simply by
being her lovely and gracious self. It was like reading a fine story to be
with her, I used to think. Her kind of charm and vivacity were such a new
thing to me.
I wish I were to see her again, Mariel. I had counted upon stopping to see you on my way East, whenever I am called back to New York10. I had a sharp illness and an exhausting little surgical operation in February, so Mr. McClure11 is going to let me stay away as long as possible.
5⬩W⬩S⬩C⬩Please let me send my love, useless as it is, to Frances12 and Ellen13 and to you. Letters do not help one, I know, and the ache of another heart does not ease one’s own. But I want you to know that I do not forget.
Very lovingly Willa CatherI am ever so much better in health now, and am here visiting Douglas14.
Miss Mariel C. Gere1 Corner D and 9th Streets Lincoln3 Nebraska ALBUQUERQUE & ASH4 APR 24 1912 WillaApr 1912
after Mother's death
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0223.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0223
- Contents
- Document is two leaves, handwritten on recto and verso of first leaf and recto only of second leaf. Includes one envelope, handwritten.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Mariel C. Gere1
- Date letter was written
- April 24, 1912
- Place letter was written
- Winslow, Arizona, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Willa Cather Collection (RG2639.AM), Nebraska State Historical Society, Lincoln, NE
Individual Annotations
Cather wore her hair short for a few years when she was a teenager and as she was starting at the University of Nebraska.
Cather enrolled in the Latin School, the University of Nebraska's preparatory school, in 1890 for one year before attending the university.
Person Annotations
Gere, Mariel Clapham (1874-1960). Cather’s university friend; a teacher. Mariel Gere, eldest daughter of Charles H. and Mariel C. Gere, born in Lincoln, NE, entered the University of Nebraska's prep school in the same year Cather did. She and her sisters visited Cather several times in Red Cloud, NE. Both were members of the Union Literary Society until Gere joined the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority in 1892. Gere graduated in the science course and taught chemistry at Lincoln High until 1941. She also served on the Lincoln City Library board for many years. Cather and Gere remained friends and correspondents; Gere defended Cather from accusations that she had been arrogant and friendless during her university years.
Gere, Mariel E. Clapham (1838-1912). Cather’s friend; mother of her
friends, the Gere sisters. Mariel Elizabeth Clapham was born in
Washington, D.C., the daughter of Captain John Clapham and Mariel Goodwin
Clapham. She corresponded with Charles Gere for several years before their
marriage in 1871, when she came to Lincoln, NE. When Cather became friends
with their daughters Mariel, Ellen, and Frances, she welcomed her to their
home at 8th and D streets. Mrs. Gere, according to Cather, persuaded her to
grow out her close-cropped hair.
Gere, Charles Henry (1838-1904). Newspaper publisher; Cather's
employer during college. Charles H. Gere, born in New York,
graduated from Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA, in 1861 and joined the
Union army. In 1865 he moved to Nebraska, where his family had moved.
Politically active in the Republican Party, he moved to Lincoln, NE, and
founded the city’s first newspaper, the Nebraska State
Journal. He married Mariel E. Clapham of Washington, D.C., in 1871.
While serving as a representative in the first state legislature, he helped
found the University of Nebraska, for which he served as regent from 1882 to
1892. Cather wrote for his newspaper when she was a university student, and
became a friend of Charles and Mariel Gere’s three daughters, Mariel, Ellen,
and Frances. She remembered Charles Gere’s “kindness, his easy wit, the ease
and charm of his personality.”
Dorris, Sarah Harris (1862-1918). American newspaper editor. Born in Massachusetts, Sarah came to Lincoln, NE, in 1870 with her parents, railroad land agent George B. Harris and his wife Sarah. She graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1888. After several years in Lincoln’s social scene, she became associated with the Lincoln Courier, a weekly newspaper. Cather, who knew Harris socially, was briefly Harris’s coeditor in the fall of 1895. After Cather moved to Pittsburgh, PA, in 1896, she contributed reviews, columns, and stories to the Courier, and she stopped in Lincoln to visit Harris occasionally on her way to and from Red Cloud. In August 1903, Cather met Edith Lewis, who also wrote for the Courier, at Harris’s house. Sarah Harris married retired surgeon Alvah H. Dorris in 1907, several years after she sold the newspaper.
McClure, Samuel Sidney (1857-1949) (“S.S.”). Irish-born
American publisher. McClure immigrated to the U.S. at age nine,
living with his family in Indiana. Despite poverty and the limited education
he had received in Ireland, he graduated from high school and then Knox
College in Illinois. He then moved to Boston, MA, where from 1882 to 1884 he
edited the Wheelman, a bicycling magazine. Despite
opposition from her parents, he married his Knox College classmate Harriet
Hurd in 1883. The couple had four biological children (Eleanor, Bess, Mary,
and Robert), and adopted one (Enrico). In 1884, S.S. started McClure’s
Syndicate, which placed fiction in newspapers across the country. In 1893
with his college classmate John Sanborn Phillips he started McClure's Magazine, which was best-known for the
"muckraking" exposés by writers such as Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens,
but which also published literature. After his cousin H.H. McClure, who
worked for the McClure Syndicate, brought Cather to S.S. McClure’s
attention, McClure, Phillips & Co. brought out Cather’s first book of
fiction, The Troll Garden (1905). When most of the
editorial staff, including Steffens and Tarbell, resigned from McClure’s in 1906, he hired Cather as an editor; she
later became managing editor. After she left her position at McClure’s in 1912 and when S. S. McClure had lost
control of the magazine still bearing his name, Cather ghost wrote his
autobiography (McClure’s serial 1913-1914, book
publication 1914). McClure made repeated—and ultimately
failed—attempts to reestablish himself in journalism and magazine
publishing, often trying to enlist Cather in these enterprises. She almost
went with him to Europe in 1915 to report on the war for the Evening Mail, and she remained personally loyal to
her mercurial and often-irresponsible former employer. He served as the
prototype for Marcus O’Mally, editor of the Outcry,
in her story “Ardessa” (1918), and it has been suggested that Cather modeled
the courtship and marriage between Myra and Oswald Henshaw in My Mortal Enemy (1926) on that of the McClures.
Gere, Frances C. (1877-1965). Cather's friend. Frances Gere,
the youngest child of Charles H. and Mariel C. Gere, was born in Lincoln,
NE. She entered the University of Nebraska in 1894 and graduated in 1898.
Like her sisters, Mariel and Ellen, she joined the Kappa Kappa Gamma
sorority and lived in Lincoln the remainder of her life.
Gere, Ellen Bladen (1875-1941) (“Ned” or “Neddums”). Cather's friend. Ellen Gere, the second daughter of Charles H. and Mariel C. Gere, was born in Lincoln, NE. She visited Cather in Red Cloud, NE, with her sisters, and Cather included her in her correspondence in the 1890s. Ellen Gere entered the University of Nebraska in Lincoln around 1892, but graduated with the class of 1899. In the 1920s she adopted two children, believing, with her friend Dorothy Canfield, that women who wanted to be mothers did not have to be married.
Cather, Charles Douglas (1880-1938) (“Douglass”). Cather’s
brother. Born in Virginia and raised in Red Cloud, NE, Charles
was third child and second son of Charles and Virginia Cather. As an
adolescent, Douglass Cather helped his father supervise rented farm
properties and worked as a messenger for the local Burlington & Missouri
Railroad office. In 1897 he left Red Cloud for a position in Sterling, CO,
and then took a position with at the Cheyenne, WY, office of the Burlington
Railroad. In 1908 he traveled to Mexico, an experience that his sister gave
to Emil Bergson in O Pioneers! (1913). By 1910 he was
working for the Santa Fe railroad and living in Winslow, AZ, where Willa
Cather visited him in 1912. He later achieved success in the oil business in
California. Although he never married, Cather notes that during the last six
or seven years of his life he had a relationship with Dorothy Rogers.
Douglass visited Cather in New York City in December of 1937. His death in
June 1938 left her devastated. Douglass served as a prototype for one of the
twin brothers in the Templeton family in “Old Mrs. Harris” (1932) and Hector
the messenger boy brother in “The Best Years” (1948). His years working for
the Burlington also inspired Cather’s many railroad worker characters in her
novels, including Song of the Lark (1915) and The Professor’s House (1925). Few letters from this
important sibling relationship have survived.
Place Annotations
