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 am mailing you today an advance copy of my new book3. Only two copies of the book have been bound up, and I am sending one to you and the other to an old friend4 in Boston5 who is ill. The book isn't formally "out" and on sale until December 7, so this copy is for you alone.
When you last wrote me, you said that you care less and less for fiction. But maybe this book will get by with you because not very much of it is actually fiction. It is so largely made up of old family stories and neighborhood stories that I scarcely know where my own contribution to it begins. The epilogue6 is literally true, every word of it. And it was the greatest experience of my early childhood - to see those two meet beside my bed, when I knew the mother7 so well and had heard about the daughter8 ever since I could remember anything.
I have been home from Canada9 only a few
weeks and letter writing has been out of the question for me,.
but
eEver since I began to write
it I have wanted to send you this book, hoping that something would ring true to
your inward self. The stage trappings of such a narrative are so easily come by, but
there is something else which eludes and eludes - - - I mean the Terrible, domesticated and a part of easy every day
life. That's what I was thinking about.
In our part of Virginia10 the house servants spoke one kind of English to white folks and another to each other.
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let1502.xml
- Letter identifier
- 1502
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, typewritten on recto only.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Viola Roseboro' 1
- Date letter was written
- November 9, 1940
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Willa Cather Papers, 1899-1949 (MSS 6494), University of Virginia, Special Collections, Charlottesville, VA
Individual Annotations
The epilogue of Sapphira and the Slave Girl is in the first person, with Cather presenting her recollection of events she witnessed as a child, while the body of the novel fictionalizes people and events that occurred before her birth.
Person Annotations
Roseboro’, Viola (1857-1945). American editor and author.
Born in Pulaski, TN, to parents whose abolitionist sympathies caused
them to flee the state shortly before the Civil War, Viola Roseboro’
graduated from Fairmount College in Monteagle, TN. Before moving to New York
City around 1882, she was an actress with a traveling stock company. In New
York she worked as a journalist and began publishing short stories in
magazines while continuing to tour occasionally until she left the stage
permanently in 1887. Roseboro’ actively published fiction for the rest of
her life, including The Joyous Heart (1903), a Civil
War novel critical of Southern slavery, and Players and
Vagabonds (1904), a collection of stories about the theater. Having
sold short stories to the McClure fiction syndicate in the 1880s, in the
early 1890s she began evaluating manuscripts for the syndicate and soon did
the same for McClure’s Magazine and book publisher
McClure, Phillips & Co. Cather evidently first met Roseboro’ in 1903,
when S.S. McClure called her to New York to discuss her fiction; the two
women began corresponding, and Roseboro’ may have influenced McClure’s
decision to hire Cather as an editor for his magazine in 1906. When most of
the magazine editorial staff walked out on McClure that year, Roseboro’
stayed, but when S.S. McClure lost control of the magazine in 1911, she left
for Collier’s Weekly. When her position there ended,
she moved to Staten Island and struggled to support herself as an author’s
consultant. When S.S. McClure regained control of his magazine in 1921, she
rejoined the staff and took an apartment at 13 Bank Street, but the position
did not last long and she was soon struggling to support herself again; a
1928 bequest from a friend alleviated her financial distress and allowed her
to live comfortably abroad and in New Dorp on Staten Island. Cather’s
letters to Roseboro’ suggest that, long after she became an established
author, Cather valued Roseboro’s friendship and her judgment in literary
matters. She particularly valued Roseboro’s response as a Southerner to Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), an advance copy
of which she sent to her.
Hills, Laura Coombs (1859-1952). American painter.
Born in the coastal town of Newburyport, MA, Hills began studying
painting as a child. Early in her career she exhibited works in oil,
watercolor, and pastel, illustrated children’s books, and undertook design
work. From the 1890s she became a noted painter of miniatures on ivory; in
the 1920s diminishing eyesight caused her shift to pastels of flowers.
Throughout her life Hills spent her summers in Newburyport. In 1903 she
moved her winter studio to 66 Chestnut Street in Boston; artist Karoline
Bernheimer shared the space while Hills’ sister Lizzie handled domestic
duties. When Cather was on assignment in Boston for McClure’s Magazine in 1907, she took an apartment on Chestnut
Street, leading to a lifelong friendship and correspondence.
Jefferson, Matilda (1812-c. 1880) (“Aunt Till”). African-American enslaved person and servant of the Seibert family. Born in Virginia, Matilda was recorded as an enslaved person in the Jacob and Rhuhamah Seibert household in 1850, but she had probably been their enslaved person from her childhood. She was still a domestic servant in the widowed Rhuhamah’s household in the 1870s. Cather remembered Matilda from her childhood and made her the prototype for Matilda, “Aunt Till,” in Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940). Cather said the epilogue to the book was written from her memory of witnessing the reunion of Matilda and her daughter Nancy, who had escaped slavery before the Civil War. The details of Matilda’s life as given in the novel—an education in housekeeping in eastern Virginia, a forced union with another enslaved person, Jefferson, a child fathered by a white man whose identity is the subject of dispute—may be true but, like the details of the lives of many enslaved people, are not documented.
Jefferson, Nancy (c. 1840-after 1880) (“Nancy Till”). African American-Canadian formerly enslaved person and housekeeper. Probably born in Virginia, Nancy Jefferson was the daughter of Matilda Jefferson, an enslaved person in the Seibert family (Cather’s maternal great-grandparents) and an unknown, presumably white, man. She escaped from slavery in the mid-1850s and made her way to Canada. Nancy was the prototype for Nancy, the enslaved girl in Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940). Cather said that the plot of the novel was based on family stories about the actual events, and that the epilogue, “Nancy’s Return,” was based on her own memory of Nancy returning to visit her mother around 1880. Lack of documentation of the lives of African Americans, and enslaved people in particular, makes it difficult to verify many of the details of Cather’s story.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940) by Willa Cather
