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 |
The cushions are a perfect fit! Couldn’t be better. I’m going to leave one here4 in the store room for next year, and take one down to New York5 with me. A foot rest always comes in handy. I seems a lot of comfort to get for a dollar,—if I read your figure right. You must be a bargain hunter.
I did enjoy our visit together Sunday evening. I will let you know every time I come here2, and I hope you can always run up to see me. Many, many thanks for the cushions. If this book6 is ever done, remind me that I promise to send you a copy with due acknowledgment of this kind deed.
Faithfully yours Willa CatherAre Austrian mountains nicer than Monadnock?
Mrs. George Whicher1 46 Amity Street Amherst3 Mass. JAFFREY2 OCT 12 1933 2 30 PMInformation about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let1196.xml
- Letter identifier
- 1196
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto only. Includes one handwritten envelope.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Harriet Fox Whicher1
- Date letter was written
- [October 11, 1933]
- Place letter was written
- Jaffrey, New Hampshire, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Literary and Historical Manuscripts (MA 2419 (20)), 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).
Person Annotations
Whicher, Harriet Fox (1890-1966). Mount Holyoke College English
Professor. Harriet Fox earned a BA from Barnard College at
Columbia University in New York City in 1910 and an MA from Columbia in
1911. She was an instructor in the Barnard College and Smith College English
Departments before she began a long career teaching English at Mount Holyoke
College in South Hadley, MA, from 1918 to 1944. Her long friendship with
Cather began in 1922 when she and her husband, George Frisbie Whicher, met
Cather at the Bread Loaf School of English, a summer program of Middlebury
College in Vermont. Cather enjoyed the company of their two sons, John Fox
Whicher and Stephen Emerson Whicher, and she corresponded with Harriet and
George until late in life. After Harriet Whicher’s retirement from teaching
she worked as a freelance copy editor at McGraw Hill and edited a collection
of her deceased husband’s essays and speeches.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
Lucy Gayheart (1935), by Willa Cather
