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 had so counted upon having a long evening's talk with you about your book4, but the serious illness of two of my friends has cut my winter all to pieces, and now I am hurrying off to California5 because my mother's6 condition has changed for the worse.
It is very difficult to tell you in a letter about the things which delighted me in your book - not this chapter or that, but the whole thing, moving along with such a refreshing calm and such an absence of that nervous tendency to force things up. I read it slowly evening after evening, and it was like taking a long voyage with a group of people who have become one's friends by the time one reaches port. I enjoyed the Brandeis family as much as the Goldmarks7, and Frederika8 is surely charming enough to give a perfume to any book. What a charm and distinction there is about the personality of your mother9 as she appears in this book - I wish I could have met her. I am so interested in the daguerreo-type10 picture of her - I think your sister Pauline11 looks very much like her.
You see, I have known a great many of those German and Bohemian families myself, in the West, three generations of them living together in little towns. I have watched the original pioneers growing old and the third generation growing up, all getting rooted into the soil and interweaving and becoming a part of the very ground. I began to watch it as a young child - it delighted me even then, and keeping in touch with those communities and watching the slow flowering of life has been one of my greatest pleasures. Your book brought it all back to me; the slow working out of fate in people of allied sentiments and allied blood. These many characters influencing each other by chance give a book a greater unity than any plan you could have made. As I have already said, reading it was like taking a long voyage with a group of people whom one likes so well that one is sorry to come into port. They have everything that was nicest about the old world and the old time, and I put your book down with a sense that even if I do not like the present very well, we have had a beautiful past.
With very deep gratitude for the happy evenings I spent with your Pilgrims of '48, for the memories they awoke and for the hope they give me for the future, I am
Your very true friend, Willa Cather From Willa Cather 35 Fifth Avenue3 New York Miss Josephine Goldmark1,1818-
Joseph Goldmark
1819-1881
who spoke the "first free
words in Austria"
March 13, 1848.
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let1043.xml
- Letter identifier
- 1043
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, typewritten on recto. Includes one typewritten envelope.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Josephine Clara Goldmark1
- Date letter was written
- March 3, 1931
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Literary and Historical Manuscripts (MA 1603 (2)), Morgan Library and Museum, New York, NY
Individual Annotations
Grosvenor Hotel (New York City): When Cather and Edith Lewis lost their 5 Bank Street apartment in 1927, they moved into the Grosvenor Hotel, where they continued to live until 1932. The hotel was located at 35 Fifth Avenue in the Manhattan borough of New York City.
Goldmark's book Pilgrims of '48 (1930) details the intersecting stories of the Goldmark, Wehle, and Brandeis families.
This portrait of Regina Goldmark is on page 264 of Pilgrims of '48.
Person Annotations
Goldmark, Josephine Clara (1877-1950). American social reformer.
Born in Brooklyn, NY, to Polish and Czech Jewish parents whose
families fled Austria after the Revolution of 1848, Goldmark earned a BA in
English from Bryn Mawr College in 1898; she then studied an additional year
and tutored at Barnard College. Her sister Pauline introduced her to
Florence Kelley of the National Consumers League, which sparked her interest
in what became her life’s work, social research and reform, with an emphasis
on working conditions for women and children. Cather met Josephine Goldmark
and her sisters Pauline and Alice (who married Louis Dembitz Brandeis and
lived in Boston) when she was on assignment in Boston for McClure’s Magazine in 1907-1908. Josephine Goldmark and Cather
became lifelong friends, although extant correspondence is scant. Cather
admired Goldmark’s book Pilgrims of ’48: One Man’s Part in
the Austrian Revolution of 1848, and a Family Migration to America
(1930), about the Goldmark, Wehle, Dembitz, and Brandeis families during the
Austrian revolution and their lives in the U.S. (Josephine’s mother was a
Wehle). In later years she and her sister Pauline lived in Hartsdale, NY.
Josephine died in White Plains, NY.
Cather, Mary Virginia Boak (1850-1931) (“Virginia” or
“Jenny”). Cather’s mother. Born in the Virginia to William Lee
Boak and Rachel Seibert Boak, Virginia was educated in Baltimore, MD, and
was a schoolteacher until her marriage to Charles Fectigue Cather in 1872.
Her husband’s family were primarily Union supporters during the Civil War
while her family supported the Confederacy (three brothers served in the
Confederate Army although their mother opposed slavery). After her marriage
she tried to help unite the divided family. Four of her children, Willa,
Roscoe, Charles Douglas, and Jessica Virginia, were born in Virginia, while
three, James Donald, Elsie Margaret, and John Esten, were born in Nebraska
after the family moved there in 1883. Despite occasional differences, Cather
remained in affectionate contact with her mother, who remained in Red Cloud,
NE, where the family settled in 1884. After her husband’s death in 1928
Virginia Cather suffered a stroke while visiting her children and their
families in California. She spent nearly three years in a sanitarium in
Pasadena, CA, unable to speak. Willa Cather visited her there several times
but was unable to travel quickly enough from Grand Manan to Red Cloud for
her funeral and interment after she died in Pasadena in 1931. Virginia
Cather was the prototype for Victoria Templeton in “Old Mrs. Harris” (1932),
which Willa Cather completed shortly before her mother’s death.
Brandeis, Fredericka Dembitz (1828-1901). Louis Dembitz Brandeis’s
mother. Born in eastern Poland, Fredericka Dembitz was the
daughter of Siegmund and Fanny Wehle Dembitz. Raised in both Poland and
Prussia, she frequently visited her mother’s relatives in Prague where she
met Adolph Brandeis, with whom she became engaged in 1848. Together they
fled to the U.S. after the Revolution of 1848 and were married in Ohio in
1849. Around 1851, they moved to Louisville, KY, where they raised four
children, including Louis Dembitz Brandeis, future justice of the U.S.
Supreme Court. Josephine Goldmark, whose family intertwined with the
Brandeises, quoted at length from Fredericka Brandeis’s unpublished memoirs
in Pilgrims of ’48: One Man’s Part in the Austrian
Revolution of 1848 and a Family Migration to America
(1930).
Goldmark, Regina Wehle (1835-1924). Mother of Cather’s friends Josephine and Pauline Goldmark. Born in Prague to Gottlieb and Eleanore Wehle, Regina was one of fifteen children. The Wehle family fled Austria after the Revolution of 1848 and settled in Madison, IN. In 1855, Regina moved to New York City to live with her uncle, Moritz Wehle. The rest of her family followed shortly thereafter when her father secured a job in the leather and hide business. In 1856, Regina became engaged to Dr. Joseph Goldmark who had also fled Austria after the revolution. The two had twelve children. Cather admired Josephine Goldmark’s book, Pilgrims of ’48: One Man’s Part in the Austrian Revolution of 1848 and a Family Migration to America (1930), particularly its portrait of Regina Goldmark.
Goldmark, Pauline Dorothea (1874-1962). American social reformer.
Born in Brooklyn, NY, to Polish and Czech Jewish parents whose
families fled Austria after the Revolution of 1848, Goldmark earned a BA in
biology from Bryn Mawr College in 1896. While studying two additional years
at Barnard College she volunteered with the New York State chapter of the
National Consumers League (NCL), and sociological research and reform became
her life’s work, in which she also enlisted her sister Josephine. Cather met
Pauline Goldmark and her sisters Josephine and Alice (who married Louis D.
Brandeis and lived in Boston) when she was on assignment in Boston for McClure’s Magazine in 1907-1908. Pauline Goldmark and
Cather became lifelong friends, although extant correspondence is sparse. In
1910, Pauline sent Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant to Cather with a proposed
article based on NCL research, and she was also instrumental in placing a
series of widely-noticed McClure’s articles by Susan
Ainslie Clark on working girls and women based in New York City similarly
based on NCL research. In later years she and her sister Josephine lived
together in Hartsdale, NY, where Pauline died.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
Pilgrims of '48: One Man's Part in the Austrian Revolution of 1848 and a Family Migration to America (1930) by Josephine Goldmark
