Greenslet, Ferris (1875-1959). American editor and writer. Born in Glens Falls, NY, Ferris Greenslet earned a BA (1897) from Wesleyan University and a PhD (1900) from Columbia University. He served as associate editor at the Atlantic Monthly from 1902 to 1907, and married Ella Stoothoff Hulst in 1903; they had two children, Marguerite (born 1904) and George (born 1906). As an author he specialized in biography. He became literary editor at Houghton Mifflin, the Boston publisher of the Atlantic, c. 1908 and was socially and professionally acquainted with Annie Adams Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett, who may have introduced him to Cather. He evidently solicited Cather to submit Alexander’s Bridge (1912), her first published novel, to Houghton Mifflin. In 1910, when Greenslet became editor in chief of the trade department, Roger Scaife divided his shares as a director of the company with him, and the two presented themselves to authors as partners, with Scaife handling book advertising and format and Greenslet negotiating contracts and supervising editing; when Greenslet was absent from the office, Scaife handled correspondence with Cather. Greenslet became a director of Houghton Mifflin in 1919 and manager of the trade department in 1933. Cather left Houghton Mifflin as a publisher for Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., because she became dissatisfied with the production and advertising of her books. However, she remained on cordial terms with Greenslet and undertook several projects for him after her departure. Her extant letters to him constitute one of the largest groups to a single correspondent.

Sedgwick, Anne Douglas (1873-1935). Anglo-American writer. Born in New Jersey, Sedgwick’s family moved to London, England, in 1882; she spent two years (1885-1887) living with her grandparents in Ohio, and five years (1891-1896) studying painting in Paris, France, but thereafter lived primarily in England. Her first novels were published in 1898 and 1899; her tenth novel, Tante (1912), about a temperamental concert pianist, became a best-seller in the United States. Tante and a later novel, The Little French Girl (1924), were both made into films. Sedgwick married British writer Basil de Sélincourt in 1908; both did volunteer work in France during World War I. Although there is no evidence Sedgwick and Cather ever met, through a mutual friend Sedgwick introduced Stephen Tennant to Cather.

Guiney, Louise Imogen (1861-1920). American poet and critic. Guiney was born in Roxbury, MA, to Irish Catholic parents. When her father died in 1887 from wounds suffered as a Union Army officer in the Civil War, the strain on family finances nearly ended her education, but she graduated from Elmhurst Academy, an elite convent school in Providence, RI. For the next twenty-one years, she lived with her mother and sister Grace in Auburndale and Boston, MA. She began publishing poetry and essays in the 1880s and quickly became part of the Boston-area cultural elite, numbering among her friends Annie Adams Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett. In 1894 she received a patronage appointment as Auburndale post-mistress to supplement her literary income. Anti-Catholic protestors boycotted her post office, causing her income to drop, but counter-protesters, literary figures and Catholics from throughout the country, ordered their stamps from her to salvage her income. In 1899 she became a cataloger at the Boston Public Library, likely with the intervention of Alice Jordan, her Auburndale friend and neighbor. In 1901, Guiney moved with her aunt to England, where she studied at Oxford University but struggled financially. In theme and content, Guiney’s poetry evoked seventeenth-century British lyric poetry. In the Pittsburgh Gazette in 1902 Cather praised Guiniey’s “excellence in expression and the mastery of meter” and later wrote aspiring poet Zoë Akins that the “richness and delicacy and restraint” of Guiney’s poetry should be a model for contemporary poets (#0152). As an editor at McClure’s Magazine Cather purchased Guiney’s poetry and met her briefly in 1909 in Auburndale, where Guiney was visiting her mother. Thereafter their correspondence became more personal. Guiney died in England. In the 1920s Cather wanted to edit a selection of Guiney’s verse, but Ferris Greenslet at Houghton Mifflin was unable to come to an understanding with Grace Guiney.