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 wonder my friends don't get bored—perhaps they do!—at the way I never seem to do anything but go on producing books. I do manage to vary the programme a little. I had a fine summer5 in Wyoming6 this year—expected to sail in August, but my father's7 serious illness8 prevented. I got back to New York9 in the late summer and put all my goods into storage. Bank street10 is now impossible because of subway construction—there will be a station almost under Number Five! It was a hard pull for me—I really loved the place. I'm up here in a lovely place3, where I finished the "Archbishop"11 last autumn. I wish to God I were doing anything as pleasant now! You ought really to send me a letter of condolence at having lost such an absorbing form of life forever. For there was a peculiar joyful, happy mood about this one. It gave me so much pleasure day by day.
Please telephone Ethel Litchfield12 for me, and ask her to write me and send me her new address to me. To lose Bank street and the Archbishop within a few months of each other is pretty hard, please tell her, and I feel that my friends ought to turn up and support me a little. I'm awfully sorry I won't be in New York when you're there. I'd love to see you.
With love always Willa Cather From W. S. Cather THE SHATTUCK INN3 AT THE FOOT OF MONADNOCK MOUNTAIN JAFFREY, N.H.2 Elizabeth Moorhead Vermorcken1 5308 Ellsworth Ave. Pittsburgh4 Penn. JAFFREY N. H.2 SEP 28 1927 6 30 AMInformation about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let0903.xml
- Letter identifier
- 0903
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto and verso. Includes one handwritten envelope.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Elizabeth Moorhead Vermorcken1
- Date letter was written
- September 27 [1927]
- Place letter was written
- Jaffrey, New Hampshire, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Literary and Historical Manuscripts (MA 1342 (7)), Morgan Library and Museum, New York, NY
Individual Annotations
Shattuck Inn (Jaffrey, NH): Hotel built in 1910 in Jaffrey, N,H owned and operated by E. C. Shattuck until his death in February 1933, when operation was taken over by his daughter, Eleanor Shattuck Austermann, and her husband George Austermann. Cather stayed at the Shattuck Inn many times, often with Edith Lewis, finding it a useful place to work. In 1947, Cather wrote of the Shattuck Inn: “I have never found any place where I could work in such peace and happiness as in the little rooms up in the top of the Shattuck Inn” (#1748).
Cather visited her brother Roscoe and his family in Casper, WY, in June and July 1927.
Charles F. Cather was ill with angina in the summer of 1927 (#0890).
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
Vermorcken, Elizabeth Moorhead (c.1866-1955). American writer and academic. Born in Pittsburgh, PA, Elizabeth Moorhead married Frederick Vermorcken in 1891, although the marriage did not last long, and she soon returned to Pittsburgh. In 1910 she began an eighteen-year teaching career as an Assistant Professor of English at Carnegie Technical Schools in Pittsburgh while also writing short stories and articles that appeared in national magazines. After retiring from teaching in 1928, she wrote three novels. After moving to Florence, Italy, in the 1930s, she began writing The Whirling Spindle (1942), about her family and friends in Pittsburgh, where she returned after Italy’s entry into WWII. Vermorcken likely met Cather in Pittsburgh in 1905, and they remained friends after Cather moved to New York City. Vermorcken wrote the first biographical account of Cather’s Pittsburgh years, These Too Were Here: Louise Homer and Willa Cather (1950).
Cather, Charles Fectigue (1848-1928). Cather’s father.
Charles Fectigue (possibly Fectique) Cather was born in the Back
Creek Valley of Virginia, north of Winchester. His family were sheep raisers
who were largely, but not entirely, Union supporters during the Civil War.
He married Mary Virginia Seibert Boak, daughter of Confederate supporters,
in 1872. In 1883 he and his family followed his parents, William and
Caroline Cather, and brother George to Webster County in Nebraska, where
various cousins and uncles had also settled. Initially he ran a ranch in the
county but soon moved his family into the town of Red Cloud, where he had an
insurance and real estate business. Four of his children, Willa, Roscoe,
Charles, and Jessica, were born in Virginia, while three, James, Elsie, and
John, were born in Nebraska. Cather’s relationship with her father was very
warm: she made regular visits to her parents in Red Cloud and especially
enjoyed her father’s letters expressing appreciation of her novels. A week
after she concluded a visit to her ailing father in Red Cloud, he died of
heart disease. He served as the prototype for Hillary Templeton in “Old Mrs.
Harris” (1932).
Litchfield, Ethel Herr Jones (1876-after 1967). Pianist; Cather’s Pittsburgh friend. Born in New Brighton, PA, near Pittsburgh, to the Reverend David and Sarah Jones, Ethel traveled to Vienna, Austria, at age twenty to study with Theodor Leschetizky with the aim of becoming a concert pianist. However, Dr. Lawrence Litchfield followed her there to court her. They married in Vienna in 1898 and returned to Pittsburgh. They had three children, Ethel Carver (1899), Lawrence, Jr. (1900), and Margaret (1903). While her children were young, she largely gave up performing but entertained visiting musicians in their home in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood, where Cather met them in 1902. Cather, May Willard, Ethel Litchfield, and Isabelle McClung formed, as Cather would later recall, a “little group” that “melted together” (#1540). It has been suggested that Litchfield’s decision to give up her musical career for marriage informed Cather’s story “The Garden Lodge” (1905). As Litchfield’s children grew older, however, she returned to the concert stage. After the 1930 death of her husband, she moved to New York City, where she dined frequently with Cather and Edith Lewis and enjoyed listening with them to recordings of Yehudi and Hepzibah Menuhin.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) by Willa Cather
