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 back again after an adventurous but not very restful summer. As I seemed to need adventure more than repose, I'm not complaining. I have brought with me my kid brother5 and put him in the Carnegie Technical School, and it is great fun to get him started. He is just off the farm and has never before been out of Nebraska6, but as he is candid and honest and has not a particle of vanity, his initiation is very jolly and not at all painful. He will tell people the names and weight of his big work horses, and all about his Bohemian neighbors, and he never tries to talk about things of which he knows nothing, so there are no difficulties. He is over six feet, rather good looking and twenty years old. I think you would like him, though he will say "yes mam" to older women—older than twenty.
The war7 broke in on things a good deal. Even when I was up in the Sangree de Cristo mountains I felt rather restless. One can’t get away from the pull of it because somehow everything one most cares about seems in danger and under test. Before this no one knew how much they cared. I don’t believe we’ll hear much about suffrage and tea-party legislation8 for awhile. Now, as always, the power to take determines the extent of possession, and that is as far as we’ve got.—Have you seen the last six or eight numbers of Punch9? Don’t miss them. It’s like going back to Henry Esmond10 after reading Galsworthy11. You feel that the old rock is still under your feet, the rock that is different from any other. Lord, they are a game people, and so orderly in their habits of banking and war. Wasn’t Kipling12's Breighton13 speech14 a fine one?
I shall go to New York15 for a week in
October, but after that I hope to be here until January 1st, working on my story16 and playing with my brother. I did no work while
I was in the west, but now I am taking it up easily and have done a lot in the three
days since we reached Pittsburgh. How and where are you? Have Have you any friends in the French army? You must be kept busy
writing to France17 these days—not that many
letters reach their destination—but send me a word, I beg of you.
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0287.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0287
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto and verso. Includes one envelope, handwritten.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant1
- Date letter was written
- [September 28, 1914]
- Place letter was written
- Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Literary and Historical Manuscripts (MA 1602), Morgan Library and Museum, New York, NY
Individual Annotations
1180 Murray Hill Avenue (Pittsburgh, PA): Located in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, PA, now part of the Murray Hill Avenue Historic District, 1180 Murray Hill was the home of Judge Samuel A. McClung and his family. Cather lived there at Isabelle McClung’s invitation from 1901 to 1906. She returned there to visit multiple times until 1915, often writing during these visits.
During the first days of August 1914, shortly after Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, Germany declared war on Russia and then France, which provoked a series of war declarations by several countries and the beginning of World War I.
Many activists for women's suffrage held fund-raising tea parties, and "Votes-for-Women Tea" was an important part of the publicity campaign for suffrage in California.
On 7 September 1914, Kipling gave a speech at the Dome in Brighton urging Englishmen to enlist and fight in the war against Germany.
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.
Cather, John (1892-1959) (“Jack”). Cather’s brother.
Born and raised in Red Cloud, NE, Jack was the seventh child and
fourth son of Charles and Virginia Cather. He was nearly two decades younger
than Willa Cather, and she was a doting older sister when he was a small
boy. Because she missed him after her 1896 move to Pittsburgh, PA, she wrote
several poems about him and the story “Jack-a-Boy” (1901). After graduating
from Red Cloud High School in 1912, Jack studied for two years at University
of Nebraska in Lincoln. With Willa Cather’s encouragement, in 1914 he
enrolled at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh to study
engineering. Willa Cather was then living in New York City but traveled to
Pittsburgh to help him settle in and enjoyed visiting him and supported his
decision to change his major to theater. It is not clear whether he
graduated from Carnegie Tech but the British government trained him as a
chemist so he could inspect munitions factories. While working in Smethport,
PA, he met Irma Wells, and they married in 1918. They had two children,
Catherine and Ella Faye. After World War I, he worked as a chemical engineer
in the oil industry in Cincinnati, OH, Casper, WY, and Bradford, PA. In 1936
he moved to Whittier, CA, and became a business partner with his brothers
Douglass and James in an oil production company. He died in Long Beach, CA.
Willa Cather mentions him frequently in letters, but she seems to have had
little contact with him and his family in later years, and no letters from
her to him have surfaced.
Galsworthy, John (1867-1933). British writer. Born to a
prosperous family near London, England, Galsworthy attended Harrow and
Oxford University, then trained for the law. His first works were published
under a pseudonym, but after the success of his first play, The Silver Box (1906), he published his novels under
his own name. His best-known work is the trilogy known as The Forsyte Saga (1906-1921). In his time he was better-known for
his plays, which dealt with many social issues. He was awarded the Nobel
Prize for literature in 1932. Willa Cather read some of Galsworthy’s works
and apparently met him on one of his visits to the U.S. with his wife in the
1920s.
Kipling, Rudyard (1865-1936). English fiction writer and poet.
Born in Bombay, India, to English parents, Kipling was sent to
England for his education but returned to India to work as a journalist. His
poems and short stories about India won him an audience in England, and he
settled in London in 1889. When he married Caroline Balestier in 1892, the
couple moved to her home state of Vermont. In 1896 Willa Cather claimed to
have met Kipling and she described the “46 minutes” of conversation with him
as “alone worth” her move to Pittsburgh to work for the Home Monthly (#0028). In 1899, Cather wrote a column about his
career for the Lincoln Courier, in which she noted
the irony of Kipling trying to “live a respectable Puritan life in Vermont
and be a full-fledged family man,” urging him to “Go back east.” In 1899, he
did leave the U.S., but for London, not India, where he remained the rest of
his life. McClure’s Magazine published Kipling’s poem
“The White Man’s Burden” (1899) and the novel Kim
(1900-1901), paying him $25,000 for serialization of the latter. When Cather
traveled to London on McClure’s business in 1909, she
carried a letter of introduction to him, but it is not clear whether she met
him again there. Throughout her life Cather expressed enthusiasm for
Kipling’s works, which she associated with a spirit of adventure, and her
letters make clear that she followed his life and career closely.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
Punch
The History of Henry Esmond (1852) by William Makepeace Thackeray
The Song of the Lark (1915) by Willa Cather
