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 think you were kind and forgiving to remember me this Christmas. I have thought of you so often, and Miss Lewis4 and I have talked of you so often. The conditions of life grow harder every day, as you must know. Miss Lewis has two sisters5 living in Brooklyn3, and even in the worst weather she cannot get a taxicab to carry her to Brooklyn. The drivers say, "That trip uses too much gas."
The servant problem has become acute. We have an excellent woman from 10:00 A. M. to 2:00 P.M. She keeps the house6 very clean and cooks our lunch for us. We cruise about the town2 for dinner — and usually the food is poor enough. Since the middle of November I have been working hard on a story7 which interested me very much. But just a week ago my right hand8 collapsed again, and now it is tied up in a brace. I am afraid I don't bear such disappointments very philosophically.
Very soon I am going to send you an early book of mine9, which I think you may like, thought it has grave faults. It has been translated into Danish and Swedish, but you have become so proficient in English and so accustomed to it, that I believe you would find the book more interesting in its native language.
With earnest good wishes for the New Year,
Affectionately Willa Cather FROM CATHER 570 PARK AVE.,NEW YORK CITY2 Sigrid Undset1 Hotel Margaret 97 Columbia Heights Brooklyn 2, N.Y.3 NEW YORK, N.Y.2 JAN 6 1945 430 PMInformation about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let1690.xml
- Letter identifier
- 1690
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, typewritten on recto only. Includes one typewritten envelope.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Sigrid Undset 1
- Date letter was written
- January 6, 1945
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Brevsamling 348, National Library of Norway, Oslo Division
Individual Annotations
570 Park Avenue (New York City): The apartment Cather shared with Edith Lewis from December 11, 1932, until her death, located in the Manhattan borough of New York City, near Central Park. They had apartment 7D. Lewis continued to live there until her own death.
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.
Of the three novels published in the first decade of Cather's career as a novelist (the 1910s), only My Ántonia (1918) seems to have been translated into both Swedish and Danish. However, either O Pioneers! (1913) or The Song of the Lark (1915), both of which feature Swedish-American protagonists and for which no Danish translations before 1945 have been located, seems more likely.
Person Annotations
Undset, Sigrid (1882-1949). Norwegian novelist. Undset is
best known for her historical novels set in medieval Norway, the Kristin Lavrandsdatter trilogy (1920-22), set in the
fourteenth-century, The Master of Hestvikin tetralogy
(1925-27), set in the thirteenth century. Early in her career she wrote
realistic novels set in contemporary Norway, including Jenny (1911) about a woman painter. She was awarded the Nobel
Prize in Literature in 1928 and continued to publish novels, set both in
contemporary and historical Norway, that reflected her conversion to
Catholicism. Undset persuaded her Norwegian publisher to issue her sister
Signe Undset Thomas’s translation of Lucy Gayheart
(1935) (the only Norwegian translation of Cather’s work to appear before her
death). A strong critic of the German Reich, Undset made a dramatic escape
from Norway over the arduous land route when the Nazis invaded Norway in
April 1940, events she later described in Return to the
Future (1942). When Undset reached New York City in the fall of
1940, Alfred Knopf, Cather and Undset’s mutual publisher, arranged their
first meeting. They had long been enthusiastic readers of each other’s
novels and were evidently established correspondents, although their extant
correspondence begins in 1940. During her exile Undset settled in a
residential hotel in Brooklyn Heights, and she and Cather saw each other
socially. Cather praised her as “just all a great woman should be - and on a
giant scale” (#1541). Undset was an active public critic of the Nazis during
her exile. She returned to Norway at the close of the war in 1945 and died
there.
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.
Lewis, Ruth Putnam (1893-1954). Edith Lewis's sister. Born in Lincoln, NE, to Henry Euclid Lewis and Lillie Gould Lewis, Ruth moved east to the Boston, MA, area with her family in 1909 and enrolled in the Sergeant School for Physical Education in 1914, graduating in 1919. Her first job as a physical education teacher was in Buffalo, NY. In the 1920s she moved to Brooklyn, NY, to teach at a private girls' school. She also worked summers at girls' camps in New England. Living in Brooklyn, she had regular contact with her sister Edith and with Willa Cather. From 1941 to 1946, she was U.S.O. Women's Activities Secretary at the Brooklyn Navy Y.M.C.A., and then worked in leadership development for the Girl Scouts. She helped her sister Edith make arrangements for Cather’s funeral and burial. She was hospitalized with cancer in Brooklyn in 1953, and died in a hospital in Braintree, MA, where her brother Harold lived.
1258Morgan, Helen Chace Lewis (1894-1984). Edith Lewis’s sister. The youngest child of Henry Euclid Lewis and Lillie Gould Lewis, Helen Lewis was born and raised in Lincoln, NE, until 1909, when her family relocated to the Boston, MA, area. In 1917 she graduated from the Sargent School for Physical Training and taught physical education in private schools in Pennsylvania and Brooklyn, NY. In 1920, she married Harold Philip Morgan; the couple had two daughters, and they lived in Lincoln, NE, the Fresno, CA, area (where her father was residing with them at the time of his 1926 death), and Seattle, WA. After her husband’s 1956 death, Helen Morgan moved to Long Island, NY; she visited her sister Edith Lewis regularly in New York City and arranged for her funeral and her burial in Jaffrey, NH, at Willa Cather’s side.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
"The Best Years," The Old Beauty and Others (1948), by Willa Cather
