Guide to Reading Letter Transcriptions
Some of these features are only visible when "plain text" is off.
| 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 |
Despite coincidental misfortunes (secretary3 out of town and the thumb4thumb of my right
hand badly sprained), I must venture a scrawl to tell you what deep pleasure
the letter5 from you and
Mrs. Greenslet6 gives me. I prefer
to think it is from both of you—indeed, you practically say so. The [illegible] rush of Virginia7 memories, when once I began to
call them up, was heavy upon me. I wrote many chapters of Virginia ways and
manners, just as things came back to me, for the relief of remembering them
in an
a a time of loss and personal sorrow.8 That "eased" me, and comforted.
Then I cut what was too solidly "manners and customs" and re-wrote the story
according to the design I had in mind when I wrote
wrote the first chapter—a pleasant
breakfast table, and incidental discussion of disposing of a gentle and
affectionate girl—(not slave girl really, but a
member of the family). The real
Nancy9's real mother10 was a
a real member of my family when I was
little. The stories about that strange relation (those I have happened to
read) were all so partisan for or against. The institution was neither a
torture prison, nor a benevolent training school. It had its pleasant
domestic surfaces. Underneath? Well, "down with us" we didn't think much
about the underneath. Aunt Till was no pitiable person
figure to me—nor to herself. Dignity,
personality!
W But a sore thumb can't go into these
matters seriously, analytically. It (the original
conception) was all light and shade, was meant to be neither wise
nor instructive—certainly not heavy. Some weeks ago I put the discard (the
excised chapters & paragraphs) on the bathroom scales, and they weighed
six pounds. I was very pleased.
P.S. Certainly11, I am
perfectly willing you should place the note on names where Alfred12 places his notes on design. I
placed it out of place in 1st edition because I feared
some people of the same name were in story, Frederick County13 people, might feel hut hurt. Second edition14 will probably change that.
Do you know there is nothing at all to a hand but a thumb?
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let1506.xml
- Letter identifier
- 1506
- Contents
- Document is two leaves, handwritten on recto and verso of first leaf and recto only of second leaf.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Ferris Greenslet1
- Date letter was written
- [November 24, 1940]
- Explanation of conjectured date
-
Cather is responding to Greenslet's letter dated November 20, 1940. The next Sunday would have been November 24, 1940.
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Houghton Mifflin Company correspondence and records, 1832-1944 (MS AM 1925), Harvard University, Houghton Library, Cambridge, MA
Individual Annotations
Cather significantly injured a tendon in her right thumb in November 1940 after signing hundreds of copies of her novel Sapphira and the Slave Girl. Her right hand was immobilized for months afterward, and the pain recurred often in later years.
On 20 November 1940, Greenslet wrote acknowledging that he had received the copy of Sapphira and the Slave Girl Cather had Knopf send. He confessed that his impression from the first few chapters was that the novel was "slighter" than My Ántonia and Shadows on the Rock, which were his favorite Cather novels, but by the end, he found it equal to them. He also reported that his wife, "for a third of a century one of [Cather's] most devoted readers," was "disposed to set it even higher."
During the years that Cather was writing Sapphira, Isabelle McClung Hambourg and Douglass Cather both died.
In Knopf's edition of Sapphira and the Slave Girl, a note about character names appeared on the last page after THE END. The note was set in italics and signed WILLA CATHER. On 20 November 1940, Greenslet suggested that this "engaging personal note" was "a little off the key" following the "moving" account of Sapphira's death. Greenslet suggested that the note could be printed in italics on the same separate page following the text of the novel proper where the "note on design" appeared.
The location of the note in the Knopf edition was not changed.
Person Annotations
Greenslet, Ferris (1875-1959). American editor and writer.
Born in Glens Falls, NY, Ferris Greenslet earned a BA (1897) from
Wesleyan University and a PhD (1900) from Columbia University. He served as
associate editor at the Atlantic Monthly from 1902 to
1907, and married Ella Stoothoff Hulst in 1903; they had two children,
Marguerite (born 1904) and George (born 1906). As an author he specialized
in biography. He became literary editor at Houghton Mifflin, the Boston
publisher of the Atlantic, c. 1908 and was socially
and professionally acquainted with Annie Adams Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett,
who may have introduced him to Cather. He evidently solicited Cather to
submit Alexander’s Bridge (1912), her first published
novel, to Houghton Mifflin. In 1910, when Greenslet became editor in chief
of the trade department, Roger Scaife divided his shares as a director of
the company with him, and the two presented themselves to authors as
partners, with Scaife handling book advertising and format and Greenslet
negotiating contracts and supervising editing; when Greenslet was absent
from the office, Scaife handled correspondence with Cather. Greenslet became
a director of Houghton Mifflin in 1919 and manager of the trade department
in 1933. Cather left Houghton Mifflin as a publisher for Alfred A. Knopf,
Inc., because she became dissatisfied with the production and advertising of
her books. However, she remained on cordial terms with Greenslet and
undertook several projects for him after her departure. Her extant letters
to him constitute one of the largest groups to a single correspondent.
Bloom, Sarah J. (1889-1961). Cather's personal secretary. Born in New York in 1889 to Russian immigrants Solomon and Bertha Bloom, Sarah J. Bloom worked for Cather from some time in the 1920s until Cather's death and continued to work for Edith Lewis on matters pertaining to Cather's literary estate thereafter. Bloom typed Cather's literary manuscripts and managed Cather's correspondence, typing dictated letters and sometimes responding for Cather when she was traveling. Bloom’s work for Cather supplemented full-time office employment in New York City (for many years she worked for the New York State Public Service Commission). She thus came to Cather and Lewis's apartment on weekends to take dictation, pick up and deliver typescripts, and deliver typed letters for signature. She died in New York city in 1961.
Greenslet, Ella Stoothoff Hulst (1873-1964). American author. Born in Brooklyn, NY, to the Rev. George W. Hulst, a Dutch Reformed minister, and Magdalene Stoothoff Hulst, Ella Hulst graduated from Vassar College in 1896. She married Ferris Greenslet in 1903, and they had two children, Marguerite (born 1904) and George (born 1906). In 1914 Houghton Mifflin published The Nightingale: A Lark under the name Ellenor Stoothoff, Ella Greenslet’s humorous novel about a woman who escapes her responsibilities as a wife by taking a motor trip through Italy. She also published work under the pseudonym Nancy Moore.
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.
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.
Knopf, Alfred A. (1892-1984). President of New York
publisher Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Knopf received his BA from
Columbia University in New York City in 1912 and founded Alfred Knopf, Inc.,
in 1915 with his future wife Blanche Wolf. They married in 1916, and their
son Alfred “Pat” Knopf was born in 1918. Cather chose him as her publisher
beginning with Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920) and
One of Ours (1922), partly because she was
dissatisfied with the promotion of her books by Houghton Mifflin but also
because she recognized the high quality of Knopf's books, as well as what
she regarded as his intelligent advertising. Knopf was noted for publishing
the work of leading European and South American writers in translation, as
well as original works. Knopf and Cather’s extensive correspondence
testifies to their mutual professional respect and to what also became an
important personal friendship.
Place Annotations
