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 |
I’m home again, came yesterday, and am perfectly happy. I can’t understand now how
I
ever felt as I did at the hospital5. But
really, it was an ugly and agonizing business6. Somehow, when you have blood-poisoning, you feel so unclean.
You pulled me out of a bad situation in Boston7 two years ago and brought me to New York2 on your back. (I seem to be a mollusck mollusk when I’m ill.) This time Fremstad8 pulled me out. Singing only three times last week,—once in
Brooklyn—she came down to the hospital unannounced and unheralded, with a motor-load
of every kind of spring flower, pulled me out of the mud-shallows and got me into
current again. She showed me how to do my hair in two braids abov above my forehead, German fashion, and to make a
chiffon thing over the bandage like Elizabeth wears in the last
act9. She showed so much interest an in
and so little horror of my ugly head, that I lost my own horror of it. It had taken
a sharp turn for the better the night before she came, and now it’s going ahead by
leaps and bounds. The moment the destruction of tissue stopped, which was not until
Wednesday night, the world turned a different color, and I was sorry I’d sent you
such a disgusting letter10. But while one
is making poison, there’s a cloud of madness over one’s brain. I never put in any
three weeks like those before. A high temperature, and consistently unrelenting pain
in such an inconvenient place—well, they make a mollusk of one, that all. But now—oh everything’s so jolly. Forget the invertebrate,
please, and consider me draped in chiffon, like Louise
of Prussia11!
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0278.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0278
- 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
- [March 1, 1914]
- 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
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 Roosevelt Hospital in New York City.
A scratch from a pin on the back of Cather's head developed into a serious infection and required hospitalization. See #0276 and #0277.
See #0277.
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.
Fremstad, Olive (1871-1951). Swedish-American opera singer.
Born in Sweden, Ann Olivia Rundquist was adopted by a
Scandinavian-American couple, the Fremstads, who raised her first in
Kristiania (now Oslo), Norway, and then in Minnesota. She moved to New York
City to study piano in 1890 and then to Germany to study voice with Lilli
Lehmann. After a successful career in Europe as a mezzo-soprano, she made
her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in 1903, where she specialized in
singing soprano roles in operas by Richard Wagner. Willa Cather first met
Fremstad in 1913 while researching “Three American Singers,” an article for
McClure’s Magazine in which Cather clearly
prefers Fremstad as “the most interesting kind of American” over Geraldine
Farrar and Louise Homer. Through 1916 Cather and Fremstad were in close and
regular contact in person and through letters, although Cather’s letters to
Fremstad have not been located and their friendship evidently cooled.
Fremstad inspired many aspects of the story, personality, and career of Thea
Kronborg, heroine of The Song of the Lark (1915), and
she approved of the novel, although Cather did not want readers to identify
the character too closely with her. Fremstad married and divorced twice.
During the period Cather and Fremstad were in regular contact Fremstad lived
as a couple with Mary Watkins (later Cushing) who, after Fremstad’s death,
published a biography of her, The Rainbow Bridge
(1954).
Von Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Louise Augusta Wilhelmina Amelia (1776-1810). Queen of Prussia. Born in Hanover, a daughter of Prince Charles of Mecklenburg-Strelitz and Princess Frederica of Hesse-Darmstadt, Duchess Louise married Crown Prince Frederick William of Prussia in 1793; they had nine children. Becoming queen of Prussia in 1797, Louise actively opposed Napoleon, involving Prussia in the Napoleonic wars, to its cost. Nevertheless, she was immensely popular before and after her early death. Renowned for her beauty and the subject of many paintings, Louise concealed a temporary slight swelling of her throat with gauze scarves when she first arrived in Prussia; this became a fashion at court. Cather alludes to this when she wore scarves to cover her head after a case of blood poisoning in 1914.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
Tannhauser (1845) by Richard Wagner
