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 |
Yes, of course I get a great many "fan" letters as you call them – but most of
them are pretty thin wind, I assure you.
It is very easy to pick out the real ones. Of course, as you intimate, it is a very
distinct disadvantage to be a Lady Author – anybody who says it isn't, is foolish. Virginia Woolf3 makes a pretty fair
statement4 of the disadvantages.
bBut young
children are neither very male nor very female, and I find that the impressions and memories that hang on from those
early days of having no particular sex,
are the safest ones to trust to – and the pleasantest ones to pay
play with. I am glad you liked the two
particular books you mention – but myself I always feel that "A Lost Lady"5 is, artistically, more successful than
either of them.
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let1033.xml
- Letter identifier
- 1033
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, typewritten on recto only.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Read Bain 1
- Date letter was written
- January 14, 1931
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Read Bain Papers 1893-1972, University of Michigan, Bentley Historical Library, Ann Arbor, MI
Person Annotations
Bain, Read (1892-1979). American sociologist. Born in Oregon, Read Bain received his A.B. from Willamette University (1916), MA from the University of Oregon (1921) and PhD from the University of Michigan (1926). He was a professor and department chair of sociology at Miami University in Oxford, OH. In his scholarship, he specialized in the sociology of the family, and as a member of the university community he advocated for women’s rights and helped found the Miami chapter of the NAACP. He and Cather briefly corresponded in 1931 when he wrote her two fan letters.
Woolf, Virginia (1882-1941). British author and journalist.
Born to Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Prinsep, Adeline Virginia
Stephen was educated mostly at home and attended the Ladies’ Department of
King’s College London from 1897 to 1901. After 1904 she became involved in
the Bloomsbury Group circle of intellectuals and artists, which included
Clive Bell, E. M. Forster, Duncan Grant, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard
Keynes, and Leonard Woolf, whom she would marry. Virginia Woolf’s first
novel, The Voyage Out, appeared in 1915, and with her
husband she founded the Hogarth Press in 1917. Woolf developed her
experimental stream-of-consciousness narrative technique in her best-known
novels, Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To
the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928).
Woolf committed suicide after a lifelong struggle with depression. Cather
admired Woolf’s writing enough to wish that Knopf would publish her work in
the U.S. (#2577).
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
A Room of One's Own (1929), by Virginia Woolf
A Lost Lady (1923), by Willa Cather
