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 |
37 Rue du Bac
7 Rue Montalambert
PARIS
à Vichy:
HOTEL ASTORIA
R. SOALHAT September 14 Dear Mr. Austermann1;
Miss Lewis4 and I are sailing for Quebec5 on the Empress of France, September 27th. We will go directly from Montreal6 to Jaffrey3 and hope to arrive there on the fourth or fifth of October.
Please if possible have our old rooms ready for us, 324 and 328 with the
bath between. We hope to stay at the Inn7 until the end end of
November.
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let1017.xml
- Letter identifier
- 1017
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto and verso. Includes one handwritten envelope.
- Person to whom letter was written
- George Austermann 1
- Date letter was written
- September 14 [1930]
- 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
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).
Person Annotations
Austermann, George (1899-1982). Hotelkeeper, the Shattuck
Inn. George Austermann, born in Missouri, married Eleanor
Shattuck in 1927; they had four sons, one of whom died in 1933. That same
year, after his wife’s father died, they took over the management of her
family’s hotel, the Shattuck Inn, in Jaffrey, NH, where Cather had been a
regular summer or fall guest since 1917.
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
