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 got both your letters—the first after the second—and have often stared at the fire and contemplated writing to you. But a laziness like a pleasant paralysis came upon me after I once began to get better. Going to the doctor4 every day seemed to take all the time there was, and he usually handled me so roughly that I took a cab home and went to bed. Now I go to him only every other day, and my noddle is healing so fast that I shall be out of bandages in two weeks and wear a patch under, my front hair brought back. I’m afraid to risk bought hair on it until it’s entirely well.
I’m still languid, and my head takes a lot of time, but I am well in every other way
and indolent enough to take things lightly. I work a little every morning and after
that do nothing; manage to ride on the bus or sit in the Park every fine
afternoon—they are so fine just now. I can sleep nine
hours without turning over. Never found it such a pleasure to do nothing before. I’m
going to see the Hoyts5 some day, when my head-gear is less complicated. I’ve been
to the opera twice, because at night I can wear use
Fremstad6's Elizabeth7
device8, but it would be rather too
romantic to wear on Bank street9, by
day. Music doesn’t tire me. But for everything else I’m like a bear in winter time.
Not a cross bear now, as I was at first, but stupid and sleepy. Isabelle10 was here almost a month, she went home a
week ago. I had my bed-room done over in white while I was in the hospital, and it
is not at all depressing now. I had to have new paint and paper on the place before
I could come back to it.
But really, the world seems a good place to get back to, and I feel an unruffled good-humor with it these days.—Let me hear how your work goes. The little that I can do in a day amuses me—like a kid’s tea party—but it does not fret me one bit. One behaves so well after a whipping! Send me good word of yourself.
Yours Willa Miss Elizabeth Sergeant1 4 Hawthorn Road Brookline3 Mass. NEW YORK, N.Y. STA. C2 MAR 19 1914 6 PMInformation about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0279.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0279
- 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 19, 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
A scratch from a pin on the back of Cather's head developed into a serious infection and required hospitalization. See #0276 and #0277.
Two braids above the forehead and a "chiffon thing" (see #0278).
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.
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.
Hoyt, Henry Martyn (1887-1920). American painter. Born in Rosemont, PA, Henry Hoyt, a brother of poet Elinor Hoyt Wylie, studied art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and attended Yale University with the class of 1907. He married fellow painter Alice Parker in 1912; they had one daughter and one son, born in 1913 and 1914 respectively. Cather knew them in New York City, attended one of their joint exhibitions in 1914, and expressed her liking for them several times. However, Alice Hoyt left Henry Hoyt a few years later, and he committed suicide.
1512Shurtleff, Alice Parker Hoyt (1885-1951). American painter. Born in New Jersey, daughter of Eleanor Gordon Parker and Wayne Parker, Alice Parker became a painter and married fellow painter Henry Hoyt in 1912; they had one daughter and one son, born in 1913 and 1914 respectively. Cather knew them in New York City, attended one of their joint exhibitions in 1914, and expressed her liking for Henry and Alice Hoyt several times. However, the Hoyts separated a few years later. After Hoyt’s suicide, Alice Hoyt married architectural historian Harold R. Shurtleff and continued with her painting.
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).
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.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
Tannhauser (1845) by Richard Wagner
