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 have been thinking a lot about you lately,
though I have just lately come back to town2 after a long stay at the Williams Inn,
Williamstown, Massachusetts3. And do you
know why I selected that place to go when I was still very weak and sick4? Well, one reason was that it was
only four hours from New York - a special
train runs for students5 once a week - - every Saturday. That was the
practical reason,.
bBut the
compelling reason was that, long ago,
Kittie Hall6 told me what pleasant vacations
she and Mr. Brownell7 had spent at the
Williams Inn. I think she said that Mr. Brownell was a Williams man. A word that one
remembers from a person whom one admired, is much more persuasive than things one
happens to hear from doctors and nurses.
The weather wasn't very good for my purpose. It rained a great deal and I had little opportunity to be out-of-doors in the sun, but nevertheless I enjoyed my stay there, and merely the connection that it had with the Brownells made it seem to touch one's own personal life a little. Miss Lewis8 went with me, and we both remember Williams Inn with pleasure, in spite of the weather. The college boys I found delightful fellows. I was registered at the inn as Miss Carter and got by successfully, except for being bawled out by the college librarian9 and persistently followed by a professor10 from Virginia11. He wrote me afterward that he had recognized me by my accent! And here I had been thinking all these years that I had successfully lost it. He comes, however, from Shepherdstown12, near Winchester13, in that little portion of "the Valley" where people do speak a good deal alike.
Don't try to answer this. I simply want to greet you because I have been thinking of you so often. I am not very strong as yet, but I have come up from one hundred and ten pound to one hundred and fifteen, which is a good beginning. ⬩W⬩S⬩C⬩I have been leading a life almost as quiet and retired as your own. It seemed as if my nerves and the inside of me needed a long rest, and I have really enjoyed my solidtude.
Lovingly yours, Willa CatherOnly victories in Africa14 can make Christmas happy for any of us.
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let1601.xml
- Letter identifier
- 1601
- Contents
- Document is two leaves, typewritten on recto only of each leaf. Viola Roseboro' has handwritten her reply to Cather on the verso of the first leaf and the recto and verso of the second leaf.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Viola Roseboro' 1
- Date letter was written
- December 18, 1942
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Gertrude Hall Brownell Collection of Viola Roseboro' Correspondence, 1936-1944 (MA.00358), Amherst College Archives and Special Collections, Amherst, MA
Individual Annotations
Cather struggled with illness throughout the spring of 1942, and her gall-bladder and appendix were removed on 24 July 1942 by Dr. Allen Whipple at the Presbyterian Hospital (#2375).
Students at Williams College.
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.
Brownell, Gertrude Hall (1863-1961) (“Kitty”). American writer and translator. Born in Boston, MA, Gertrude Hall published poetry and short fiction in the 1890s, and translated Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac (1898); later she translate Rostand’s Chantecler (1910) and Paul Verlaine’s poetry. She married critic William Crary Brownell in 1921. Cather first encountered Hall’s Wagnerian Romances, which retold the stories of Wagner’s opera, while in the Southwest, and, as Cather wrote in an introduction to Knopf’s 1925 edition of the book, it influenced the account of Thea Kronborg’s career in The Song of the Lark (1915). Cather appears to have known the Brownells socially in New York City.
Brownell, William Crary (1851-1928). American critic and editor.
Born in New York City, Brownell graduated from Amherst College in
1871. He wrote for the New York World and the Nation before becoming literary advisor at Scribner’s
from 1888 to 1926. He published works on French art and culture and on
British and American prose writers; the National Institute of Arts and
Letters awarded him its gold medal in 1925. Ten years after the death of his
first wife, Virginia Swinburne Brownell, he married writer Gertrude Hall in
1921. Cather appears to have known the Brownells socially in New York City;
she was pleased with a letter he wrote her about My
Ántonia (1918).
Lewis, Edith Labaree (1881-1972). Magazine editor,
advertising copywriter, and Cather's domestic partner. Born in
Lincoln, NE, to Henry Euclid Lewis and Lillie Gould Lewis, Edith Lewis
attended the preparatory school associated with the University of Nebraska,
earning college credits from the University before transferring to Smith
College in Northampton, MA, in 1899. She received an A.B. in English from
Smith in 1902 and returned home to teach elementary school. She met Willa
Cather in the summer of 1903 at the home of Sarah Harris, publisher of the
Lincoln Courier. Moving to New York City soon
afterward, Lewis settled into a studio on Washington Square and found work
at the Century Publishing Company. Cather was her guest when she visited the
city from Pittsburgh. In 1906, at Cather's suggestion, Lewis applied for a
position as an editorial proofreader at McClure's
Magazine, and the two women worked together on the McClure's staff for six years. In 1908, they moved
into a shared apartment at 82 Washington Place, and then, in 1912, to Five
Bank Street. Lewis left McClure's in 1915 to become
managing editor of Every Week Magazine, where she
stayed until the magazine folded in 1918. In 1919 she began a long career as
an advertising copywriter at the J. Walter Thompson Co. In 1926 Edith Lewis
acquired the land on which she and Cather built their cottage on Grand Manan
Island. When they lost their apartment on Bank Street to subway construction
in 1927, they shared quarters at the Grosvenor Hotel when they were both in
New York City. In 1932 they took an apartment at 570 Park Avenue. Throughout
their relationship, Lewis was closely involved in Cather's creative process,
reading and editing her work in pre-publication forms. Cather's will
appointed Lewis as executor of her literary estate and a beneficiary of her
literary trust. Lewis authorized E.K. Brown as Cather's first biographer and
published her own memoir of Cather, Willa Cather
Living (1953). She remained in their Park Avenue apartment after
Cather's death and died there after a long period of illness and invalidism.
She is buried at Cather's side in Jaffrey, NH.
Stephens, Alida Miriam (1879-1966). American librarian. Born in Maryland, youngest daughter of Wilbur C. Stephens and Martha A. Leaverton Stephens, Alida Stephens moved to Winchester, MA, with her widowed mother and two sisters, where she attended college in 1900. By 1910 she was working as a librarian in Washington, DC. During World War I she joined the American Red Cross, and was assigned to the American Library in Paris, France, serving as the acting director in 1921-1922. She returned to the U.S. in 1927 and by 1930 was on the staff of the Williams College Library in Williamstown, MA. She became acting director of the library in 1942, the year she encountered Cather. Stephens held the position until 1947 when a male Williams College graduate was appointed director. She died in Williamstown and was buried in Chestertown, MD.
Licklider, Albert (1874-1959). Williams College English professor. Born in Shepherdstown, WV, Licklider received both his BA (1896) and MA (1897) from Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, VA. He received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1907 and published his dissertation Chapters on the Metric of the Chaucerian Tradition in 1910, which was his best-known work. In 1914, he joined the English department at Williams College in Williamstown, MA, and taught literature until he retired in 1941. Cather met Licklider during her 1942 visit to Williamstown.
Place Annotations
