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 |
No, I wasn't angry at anything whatever. I simply thought that Louise5 would call me up or come to see me
if she wished to see me, as the other persons who wished to see me did. That
is surely the usual method of procedure when a stranger is stopping in a
town for a few days. Sarah Dorris6 had
arranged for me to do so many things that I really had very little time. I'm
sorry if Louise was offended, but it would have be been perfectly easy for her to see me had
she wanted to. And I would have been glad to see her, as I always am. I
always find her interesting, and I have great respect for her intelligence
which is of no common order. I even resent the patronizing tone some of her
students seem to take toward her. I certainly did not mean to be
ungracious.
I am sending Mr. Bates7 something I love for Christmas.
Miss Elsie Cather1 Red Cloud3 Nebraska NEW YORK, N.Y.2STA.O. DEC 20 1915 12 MInformation about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let1917.xml
- Letter identifier
- 1917
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto only. Includes one envelope, handwritten.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Elsie Cather1
- Date letter was written
- [December 19, 1915]
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Susan J. and James Rosowski Cather 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, 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.
Pound, Louise (1872-1958). American folklorist and university
professor. Pound and Cather met when both were students at the
University of Nebraska in Lincoln, where Cather also knew Louise’s brother
Roscoe and sister Olivia. Cather was deeply infatuated with Louise, who was
both an outstanding student and an accomplished multi-sport athlete. Pound
visited Cather in Red Cloud, NE, several times, but she apparently did not
reciprocate Cather’s intense affection, and Cather’s lampoon of Roscoe Pound
in “Pastels in Prose” (1894) caused a rift between the two women. Pound
earned a BA from Nebraska in 1892, an MA in 1895, and a PhD from the
University of Heidelberg in 1900. She was a professor in the English
department at the University of Nebraska, where she taught Cather's sister
Elsie, until 1945. From 1954-55 she served as the first female president of
the Modern Language Association.
Dorris, Sarah Harris (1862-1918). American newspaper editor. Born in Massachusetts, Sarah came to Lincoln, NE, in 1870 with her parents, railroad land agent George B. Harris and his wife Sarah. She graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1888. After several years in Lincoln’s social scene, she became associated with the Lincoln Courier, a weekly newspaper. Cather, who knew Harris socially, was briefly Harris’s coeditor in the fall of 1895. After Cather moved to Pittsburgh, PA, in 1896, she contributed reviews, columns, and stories to the Courier, and she stopped in Lincoln to visit Harris occasionally on her way to and from Red Cloud. In August 1903, Cather met Edith Lewis, who also wrote for the Courier, at Harris’s house. Sarah Harris married retired surgeon Alvah H. Dorris in 1907, several years after she sold the newspaper.
Bates, Herbert (1868-1929). American educator and writer. Born in Massachusetts, Bates received his BA from Harvard (1890), where he contributed to campus publications. In 1891 he came to the University of Nebraska as an instructor in rhetoric; Cather was one of his students, and he inspired the character of Gaston Cleric in My Ántonia (1918). When he left Nebraska in 1896 she applied unsuccessfully for his position. He published a volume of poetry, Songs of Exile (1896), before joining the faculty of the Manual Training High School in Brooklyn, NY, in 1897. He became active in the National Council of Teachers of English, wrote A History of English Literature (1918), and edited Modern Lyric Poetry (1929), and various classics. Cather owned a copy of his edition of Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1895) and kept in occasional touch with him until his death.
Place Annotations
