Guide to Reading Letter Transcriptions
Some of these features are only visible when "plain text" is off.
| 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 was much cheered by your kind and friendly letter. I had hoped to join you by this time,3 but my doctor and my publisher have conspired to keep me in town4 and in some uncertainty. I think there is little doubt but that I can get to you before the middle of the month, and I am looking forward eagerly to a stay in your mountains. I will write you the date of my arrival as soon as I can be sure of it. I may bring a friend, Miss Edith Lewis5, with me, if that would be quite agreeable to you. Dorothy Canfield6 told me you were not cramped for room. Miss Lewis used to work with me on McClures7 (McClure's Magazine,) and we have this apartment8 in New York2 together.
Faithfully yours Willa CatherPerhaps I ought to ask you whether Miss Lewis could get accommodations at the Inn for several weeks at its regular rates for paying guests?
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0608.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0608
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto only.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Wilfred Edward Davison 1
- Date letter was written
- July 2, [1922]
- Explanation of conjectured date
-
The conjectured year of this letter is derived from the fact that Cather lectured at the Bread Loaf School of English in July 1922.
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Wilfred Edward Davison correspondence, Middlebury College, Davis Family Library, Middlebury, VT
Individual Annotations
See #0580 for Cather's agreement to lecture at the Bread Loaf School of English in the first or second week of July 1922.
Cather was finishing up work on One of Ours (1922).
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
Davison, Wilfred Edward (1887-1929). American academic. Born
in South Walden, VT, Wilfred Davison graduated from Middlebury College in
1913 and pursued graduate work at Harvard and Columbia. He taught in the
German department at Middlebury before transferring to the American
Literature department in 1921. As the first dean of the Bread Loaf School of
English, a summer program of Middlebury, Davison recruited nationally-known
faculty and invited visiting writers, including Willa Cather, Robert Frost,
and Dorothy Canfield Fisher to interact with the school’s students.
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.
Fisher, Dorothy Canfield (1879-1958). American novelist; educational
and social reformer. Dorothy Canfield and Willa Cather became
friends in 1891 at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, where Canfield's
father, James Canfield, had come to serve as Chancellor. The family moved to
Columbus, OH, in 1895 when James Canfield assumed the presidency of Ohio
State University, from which Dorothy graduated in 1899. She then followed
her father to New York City, where he became Librarian of Columbia
University, and she pursued graduate study in Romance Languages at the
University of Paris and Columbia, from which she earned a PhD in 1904. On
Cather’s first trip to Europe, she spent time in France and England with
Canfield, including an awkward visit to the home of poet A.E. Housman.
Cather derived the central character of “The Profile” (1907) from Canfield’s
friend Evelyn Osborne, whom Cather had met in Europe. Cather and Canfield
became estranged for more than a decade because Canfield objected to the
story’s planned inclusion in The Troll Garden (1905).
Canfield married John Redwood Fisher in 1907, and their primary residence
was Arlington, VT. Canfield Fisher had spent 1916-1918 in France engaging in
war relief work, and Cather’s consultation with her about the accuracy of
her depiction of wartime France in One of Ours (1922)
led them to reconcile. In 1925 Canfield Fisher became a founding member of
the Book of the Month Club selection committee. She published her novels
(most of them very popular) under the name Dorothy Canfield but her various
nonfiction works as Dorothy Canfield Fisher.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
McClure's Magazine
