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 |
Post cards are enough—I understand the rush and the number of notes and telegrams that “meeting” Londoners entails. Since I wrote you1 I’ve been in New York5 twice—have leased and moved my effects into the ideal, the perfect apartment6, large old-fashioned, roomy, one flight up; good fire- places, good windows, good woodwork, wide stairways, and, if you please, number 5 Bank Street, off Greenwich Ave., two blocks from Jeffersons Market. I hope to be here now until January. Everything going well, work pretty well. These calls to the New York office7 do interrupt. Your card makes me restless. I want to be in London4. There’s no place like it!
Hastily W. S. C. Miss Elizabeth Sergeant1 c/o S. F. Muirhead3 24 Belsize CrescentHampstead N. W. London4 England PITTSBURGH, PA2 1912
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0244.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0244
- 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
- October 6 [1912]
- Place letter was written
- Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Literary and Historical Manuscripts (MA 1602 (23)), Morgan Library and Museum, New York, NY
Individual Annotations
5 Bank Street (New York City): The apartment Cather shared with Edith Lewis beginning in 1912, located in Greenwich Village in the Manhattan borough of New York City. Subway construction forced Cather and Lewis to relocate in 1927.
The office of McClure's Magazine.
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.
Muirhead, James Fullarton (1853-1934), Scottish editor and writer. Born in Glasgow, Scotland, to John James Muirhead and Isabella Fullarton Muirhead, James Fullarton Muirhead studied at the Craigmount School in Edinburgh, Scotland, and earned an MA from the University of Edinburgh in 1874, after which he edited the Chamber’s Encyclopedia for three years. In 1877, he began a thirty-seven-year career as an editor of the American and English editions of Handbook for Tourists, published by Karl Baedecker. In 1894, he married Helen Quincy of Boston, MA, and the two split their time between Massachusetts and London, England. He wrote about his experiences in the U.S. in America, the Land of Contrasts (1898). The Muirheads were friends of Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, whom Cather knew well, but it is unclear if Cather ever met the Muirheads.
Place Annotations
