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 |
February 13 Dear Mother1:
I am ashamed that I only write to you when I am sick, and I do get such queer things
the matter with me. A week or so ago I got a little scratch on the back of my neck,
from a collar pin, it got infected in some mysterious way and pretty much all the
back of my head is affected. I may have to go to the hospital and have the back of
my head shaved and go have an ether operation,
for if it is lanced at all it must be lanced in a good many places. What I am trying
to do is to bring it to a head in one place by drawing it. I have to take a good
deal of morphine because the pain is very severe and I can't get any sleep without
a
narcotic. Isabelle4, poor girl, comes
tomorrow. She always seems to come for a funeral instead of a party.
Of course all this is a dreary and expensive business and holds me up on my new story5 to such a degree that I am more disengaged than I have been for many years. I don't see why I always have to have such painful illnesses. But I guess you and I, mother, will always have hard sicknesses if we have any. I remember the time your face ulcerated from a tooth and Dr. McKeeby6 lanced it.
I've had blood poisoning before, but it's much more painful in your scalp than anywhere else, because the skin there is tough and tight and not easily treated. I meant to send you a Valentine, mother dear, but I've been in bed for nearly a week, not caring about anything. I have two doctors, but there is not much they can do except wait to see how much they can each draw the ulceration to a head. Please read this to Elsie7 as I may not get a note off to her.
Lovingly WillieInformation about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let1908.xml
- Letter identifier
- 1908
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto and verso.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Mary Virginia Boak Cather1
- Date letter was written
- February 13 [1914]
- Explanation of conjectured date
-
Internal evidence suggests that this letter was written around the same time that Cather experienced a blood infection caused by a hatpin scratch in 1914.
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Philip L. and Helen Cather Southwick Collection (MS228), University of Nebraska–Lincoln Libraries, Archives & Special Collections, Lincoln, NE
Individual Annotations
5 Bank Street (New York City): The apartment Cather shared with Edith Lewis beginning in 1912, located in Greenwich Village in the Manhattan borough of New York City. Subway construction forced Cather and Lewis to relocate in 1927.
Person Annotations
Cather, Mary Virginia Boak (1850-1931) (“Virginia” or
“Jenny”). Cather’s mother. Born in Virginia to William Lee Boak
and Rachel Seibert Boak, Virginia was educated in Baltimore, MD, and was a
schoolteacher until her marriage to Charles Fectigue Cather in 1872. Her
husband’s family were primarily Union supporters during the Civil War while
her family supported the Confederacy (three brothers served in the
Confederate Army although their mother opposed slavery). After her marriage
she tried to help unite the divided family. Four of her children, Willa,
Roscoe, Charles Douglas, and Jessica Virginia, were born in Virginia, while
three, James Donald, Elsie Margaret, and John Esten, were born in Nebraska
after the family moved there in 1883. Despite occasional differences, Cather
remained in affectionate contact with her mother, who remained in Red Cloud,
NE, where the family settled in 1884. After her husband’s death in 1928
Virginia Cather suffered a stroke while visiting her children and their
families in California. She spent nearly three years in a sanitarium in
Pasadena, CA, unable to speak. Willa Cather visited her there several times
but was unable to travel quickly enough from Grand Manan to Red Cloud for
her funeral and interment after she died in Pasadena in 1931. Virginia
Cather was the prototype for Victoria Templeton in “Old Mrs. Harris” (1932),
which Willa Cather completed shortly before her mother’s death.
Hambourg, Isabelle McClung (1877-1938). Cather’s longtime
friend. Cather met Isabelle McClung, the daughter of a socially
prominent, Pittsburgh (PA) family, in 1899 in the dressing room of actress
Lizzie Hudson Collier. McClung seems to have been the first woman to
reciprocate Cather’s romantic affections. In 1901, McClung invited Cather to
live in her family’s large home in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of
Pittsburgh. She and Cather traveled together to Europe in 1902, and McClung
accompanied Cather on a visit home to Nebraska in 1905. After Cather moved
to New York City in 1906, she frequently visited McClung in Pittsburgh,
finding the familiar house a congenial place to write, and McClung visited
New York City, staying with Cather and Edith Lewis. Cather and McClung also
rented a vacation cabin in Cherry Valley, NY, in 1911, and traveled together
to Virginia in 1913. In late 1915, shortly after the death of her father,
Judge Samuel McClung, Isabelle announced her intention to marry violinist
Jan Hambourg. Cather reacted negatively to the marriage (which took place in
1916) but eventually reconciled herself to it, enjoying long visits with the
Hambourgs in Toronto, Ontario, in 1921 and France in 1923 and 1935. Cather
and Edith Lewis also spent time with the Hambourgs in Paris is 1930 and
1935. The latter trip occurred after Isabelle sought treatment in the U.S.
for the kidney disease that killed her several years later in Italy. Her
death came only four months after Cather’s brother Douglass died, leaving
her feeling bereft. “No other living person cared as much about my work,
through thirty-eight years,” she wrote her brother Roscoe (#2137). After
Isabelle’s death, Jan sent to Cather the six hundred letters from Cather to
Isabelle in his possession, and Cather destroyed them, although a few
letters from Isabelle and Cather postcards to Isabelle are extant.
McKeeby, Gilbert E. (1844-1905). Red Cloud physician. Born in Ohio and reared in Wisconsin, McKeeby served in the Civil War and afterwards studied medicine. He married Carrie Ansdell in 1868; they had two children, Fred and Lucille. In 1882 the family came to Red Cloud, NE, where McKeeby was active politically, being elected mayor in 1887 and state senator in 1894. He also edited the Red Cloud Republican from June 1889 until the paper folded. In 1897 the McKeebys moved to Oklahoma and later to Pueblo, CO, where he died. Cather portrayed him as Dr. Archie in The Song of the Lark (1915).
Cather, Elsie Margaret (1890-1964) (“Bobbie”). Cather’s
sister. Born in Red Cloud, NE, shortly before Willa Cather
graduated from high school, Elsie attended the University of Nebraska in
Lincoln from 1908 to 1910, before transferring to Smith College, in
Northampton, MA, from which she graduated with an A.B. in English and Latin
in 1912. She undertook graduate study at the University of Nebraska in 1914
and in 1916 received her A.M. with a major in philosophy and a minor in
English. At both the undergraduate and the graduate level at Nebraska, she
studied under Louise Pound. She began a career in high school teaching in
1912, when she took a position in Lander, WY, where her brother Roscoe then
lived with his family. She also taught in Albuquerque, NM; Corning, IA;
Cleveland, OH; and briefly Red Cloud, when illness in the family brought her
home. Her longest tenure as a teacher was at Lincoln (NE) High School, where
she began teaching in 1920, with Olivia Pound and Mariel Gere as colleagues.
Willa Cather's expectation that Elsie be responsible for aging family and
friends and for legal affairs after their parents' deaths sometimes brought
the sisters into conflict. Elsie Cather retired from Lincoln High School in
1942. She died in Lincoln.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
The Song of the Lark (1915) by Willa Cather
