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 |
Your letter3 finally reached me, and I
wish you could know how much pleasure it brought with it. You realize exactly the
reason why I was so hopeful that you would like it,
this book4,
and that you would find it true to the spirit of that civilization which, as you
say, was so "pleasantly surfaced". And you have seen through to the core of my
experience in writing the book. It "eased" the hurt of bitter sorrow, because when
the present was painful, it was a help to me to turn back to those very early
memories. When I took the story up again after the long break,5 there was a kind of religious comfort in
remembering and in trying to treat the material humbly and truthfully and not to
overcolor it. I do feel proud and honored that it rings true to an exiled Southerner
whose experience has been so like my own. Of course, your real knowledge of the
South is much deeper and more discriminating than mine.
With love and deep gratitude to one of my earliest critics6, who was brave enough to tell me that I was certainly going wrong when I tried to write about things of which I had only the most superficial knowledge.
Willa CatherInformation about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let1509.xml
- Letter identifier
- 1509
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, typewritten on recto only.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Viola Roseboro' 1
- Date letter was written
- November 28, 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
Cather sent an advance copy of Sapphira and the Slave Girl with #1502, in which she explained her approach and the novel's relationship to her personal experiences. In an undated letter Roseboro' praised Sapphira. Finding much "in common" in both of their memories of Southern childhoods, Roseboro' observed that "a wide gulf" separated them both from "the romance of early memories" of "a culture so anciently founded, and when all is said so pleasantly surfaced!" She also observed that "the writing of this pulsing book" must have "comforted" or "eased" Cather "thro bitter sorrows."
Cather began writing the novel in 1936, and then in 1938 her work on it was nearly derailed by the deaths of Douglass Cather and Isabelle McClung Hambourg.
That is, Roseboro'.
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.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940) by Willa Cather
