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 |
For me the voyage was magnificent—I nearly always feel too good to be
true at sea, and this time we had heavenly weather. Miss Lewis4 was miserable, as always on the
water, but she was not violently ill. One of my pleasures on the way over
was the reading of your book5, which seems to
me very different from any American novel I have ever read. The first thing
that struck me was that no other picture of our manners had made us of[?]
so deeply and, I might say, warmly provincial as that. It’s as if every town was a big,
quarrelling family. The people, even the enemies, are so intimate with each other—an intimacy that
almost makes one shudder, whether it is in enmity or friendship. I realize at once, on seeing it presented, that
this is characteristic of of our
communities, but I had never thought much about it before. Of the individual
people, I think I found “Tura Lura” the most interesting. There is a
fascination about her which I can’t explain to myself, and a haunting
quality which is quite apart from the pathos of her fate. She moves through
the pages in a curious way of her own and one continually feels the beauty
and mysteriousness of her. Brace and his wife are both wonderful characters,
and they help to interpret everybody else. The rebel college professor
stands out among the best of the people. I would like to have a whole book
about him. Perry seemed to me more clear in the first part of the book than
in the last—but the ferment which makes a personality was the theme of
your book, was it not? That ferment I feel more than I feel the man who
emerged from it.
I must wait until I can talk it over with you to go into the story in detail,
but I do not want to wait that long to tell you what a singularly live and
vital book I think it. There is everywhere a kind of heartening vigor about
it, like the sound of hammer on the anvil—one of the sounds I always
find most stimulating in the activities of
of mortal men. There is such a throb of energy in the story, apart from its
emotional richness, a kind of prod[?] prodigal interest in people and
things that keeps perpetually kindling as one reads.
Paris2 was never so beautiful before,
and we have had golden weather with soft gray days between. We are staying
in this hotel just across the river from the Lourve Louvre, and look out upon it and the green river and the
bridges perpetually. The Luxembourg gardens are all gold and green, as beautiful as youth [illegible] itself. The many crippled soldiers
who take the air there in motor-tricycles, and the old veterans of 1870 who
come to help them about, and the little boys who come by to help both sets
of cripples,—all these make one remember that all this beauty is
preserved and kept at a cost. We will have much to tell you when we get
back. In the meantime, we send you a great deal of love. Please don’t move
away from Bank street! I like to think that you are there.
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0507.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0507
- Contents
- Document is two leaves, handwritten on recto and verso of each leaf. Includes one handwritten envelope.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Viola Roseboro' 1
- Date letter was written
- June 5 [1920]
- Place letter was written
- Paris, Île-de-France, France2
- Location of original letter
- Willa Cather Papers, 1899-1949, in the Clifton Waller Barrett Library (#6494-6494-i), University of Virginia, Special Collections, Charlottesville, VA
Person Annotations
Roseboro’, Viola (1857-1945). American editor and author.
Born in Pulaski, TN, to parents whose abolitionist sympathies caused
them to flee the state shortly before the Civil War, Viola Roseboro’
graduated from Fairmount College in Monteagle, TN. Before moving to New York
City around 1882, she was an actress with a traveling stock company. In New
York she worked as a journalist and began publishing short stories in
magazines while continuing to tour occasionally until she left the stage
permanently in 1887. Roseboro’ actively published fiction for the rest of
her life, including The Joyous Heart (1903), a Civil
War novel critical of Southern slavery, and Players and
Vagabonds (1904), a collection of stories about the theater. Having
sold short stories to the McClure fiction syndicate in the 1880s, in the
early 1890s she began evaluating manuscripts for the syndicate and soon did
the same for McClure’s Magazine and book publisher
McClure, Phillips & Co. Cather evidently first met Roseboro’ in 1903,
when S.S. McClure called her to New York to discuss her fiction; the two
women began corresponding, and Roseboro’ may have influenced McClure’s
decision to hire Cather as an editor for his magazine in 1906. When most of
the magazine editorial staff walked out on McClure that year, Roseboro’
stayed, but when S.S. McClure lost control of the magazine in 1911, she left
for Collier’s Weekly. When her position there ended,
she moved to Staten Island and struggled to support herself as an author’s
consultant. When S.S. McClure regained control of his magazine in 1921, she
rejoined the staff and took an apartment at 13 Bank Street, but the position
did not last long and she was soon struggling to support herself again; a
1928 bequest from a friend alleviated her financial distress and allowed her
to live comfortably abroad and in New Dorp on Staten Island. Cather’s
letters to Roseboro’ suggest that, long after she became an established
author, Cather valued Roseboro’s friendship and her judgment in literary
matters. She particularly valued Roseboro’s response as a Southerner to Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), an advance copy
of which she sent to her.
Lewis, Edith Labaree (1881-1972). Magazine editor,
advertising copywriter, and Cather's domestic partner. Born in
Lincoln, NE, to Henry Euclid Lewis and Lillie Gould Lewis, Edith Lewis
attended the preparatory school associated with the University of Nebraska,
earning college credits from the University before transferring to Smith
College in Northampton, MA, in 1899. She received an A.B. in English from
Smith in 1902 and returned home to teach elementary school. She met Willa
Cather in the summer of 1903 at the home of Sarah Harris, publisher of the
Lincoln Courier. Moving to New York City soon
afterward, Lewis settled into a studio on Washington Square and found work
at the Century Publishing Company. Cather was her guest when she visited the
city from Pittsburgh. In 1906, at Cather's suggestion, Lewis applied for a
position as an editorial proofreader at McClure's
Magazine, and the two women worked together on the McClure's staff for six years. In 1908, they moved
into a shared apartment at 82 Washington Place, and then, in 1912, to Five
Bank Street. Lewis left McClure's in 1915 to become
managing editor of Every Week Magazine, where she
stayed until the magazine folded in 1918. In 1919 she began a long career as
an advertising copywriter at the J. Walter Thompson Co. In 1926 Edith Lewis
acquired the land on which she and Cather built their cottage on Grand Manan
Island. When they lost their apartment on Bank Street to subway construction
in 1927, they shared quarters at the Grosvenor Hotel when they were both in
New York City. In 1932 they took an apartment at 570 Park Avenue. Throughout
their relationship, Lewis was closely involved in Cather's creative process,
reading and editing her work in pre-publication forms. Cather's will
appointed Lewis as executor of her literary estate and a beneficiary of her
literary trust. Lewis authorized E.K. Brown as Cather's first biographer and
published her own memoir of Cather, Willa Cather
Living (1953). She remained in their Park Avenue apartment after
Cather's death and died there after a long period of illness and invalidism.
She is buried at Cather's side in Jaffrey, NH.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
Storms of Youth (1920) by Viola Roseboro'
