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 |
ALFRED A. KNOPF 730 Fifth Ave., NEW YORK Jaffrey2 Sept. 18 My Dear Louise1:
I'm not in Rome4—I'm in Jaffrey! When
I got to Red Cloud5 in July my
father6 had the first serious
illness of his life—angina. I stayed until he began to get better, then
dashed back to New York3 and put all
my goods in storage. Five Bank
street7 is a thing of the past. All this held us8 until past our sailing date. When we
were in the midst of moving, Miss Lewis' mother9 had a stroke in Springfield10. Edith felt she could not go far from
Springfield, and as MEMO to _____ date _____
ALFRED A. KNOPF 730 Fifth
Ave., NEW YORK we were both terribly tired we came here11, where I always like it and
where I'm well treated. I'm going to stay here some weeks and rest—not think
about anything but the weather. Then I'll probably go to Arizona12, and we'll hope to get abroad
early in the spring.
Oh did you see the Hard Boiled Virgin13's review14 of the Bishop15? I'm sure some kind friend at the museum would rush it16 to you—'tis but human nature. And Rebecca West17's was18 very interesting didn't you think? A real idea19, several of them in it.
MEMO to _____ date _____ALFRED A. KNOPF 730 Fifth Ave., NEW YORK
I began this in the juniper pasture, so please excuse. I'm almost to lazy to trail a pen over paper, and the ever-growing pile of letters I have to answer makes me numb.
Dear innocent, the green is too expensive to bind many books in—only the first 20,000 were done in it, it has already gone into sober brown, and I find myself with out one green copy to keep!
What about the walking trip? You don't tell me.
Will you drop into Lord & Taylor's some day and get me three hair nets of the enclosed variety? They go rather fast up here. And write me anything cheerful you happen to know.
With love W. S. C. THE SHATTUCK INN AT THE FOOT OF MONADNOCK MOUNTAIN JAFFREY, N. H.2 Miss Louise Guerber1 Metropolitan Museum of Art 81st St. & Fifth Avenue New York3 N. Y. JAFFREY N. H.2 SEP 21 1927 5 30 AM THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUMOF ART
RECEIVED
SEP 22 1927
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let2878.xml
- Letter identifier
- 2878
- Contents
- Document is three leaves, handwritten on recto of each leaf only. Includes one handwritten envelope.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Louise Guerber1
- Date letter was written
- September 18 [1927]
- Place letter was written
- Jaffrey, New Hampshire, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Willa Cather Collection (Burroughs 26), Drew University Library, Special Collections and Archives, Madison, NJ
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.
Shattuck Inn (Jaffrey, NH): Hotel built in 1910 in Jaffrey, N,H owned and operated by E. C. Shattuck until his death in February 1933, when operation was taken over by his daughter, Eleanor Shattuck Austermann, and her husband George Austermann. Cather stayed at the Shattuck Inn many times, often with Edith Lewis, finding it a useful place to work. In 1947, Cather wrote of the Shattuck Inn: “I have never found any place where I could work in such peace and happiness as in the little rooms up in the top of the Shattuck Inn” (#1748).
In her scathingly negative review, Newman professed herself mystified by Cather's popularity with readers and the respect granted her by critics. She excoriated her prose style and dismissed her characters as uninteresting.
In West's very long review, she praised Cather's depiction of sensory experiences, linking this to Cather's handling of the Roman Catholic faith. She also compared Cather's treatment of indigenous traditions in the Southwest to D.H. Lawrence's.
Person Annotations
Burroughs, Ella Louise Guerber (1900-1985) (“Louise”). American librarian and curator. Ella Louise Guerber was born in Allentown, PA, and graduated from Cedar Crest College in 1919 and then the library school at Columbia University. At the time she met Cather in 1925, she was a reference librarian at the Denver Public Library and assisted Cather with her research on Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). In 1926, Guerber moved to New York City to take a position at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and she saw Cather frequently in person. She married Bryson Burroughs, Curator of Paintings, in 1928; he died in 1934. In 1950, when she received an honorary degree from Cedar Crest, she was Associate Curator of Paintings at the Met. After her retirement, she moved to Baltimore, MD, and then Princeton, NJ, where she died. Her friendship with Cather is documented by more than seventy letters from Cather to Burroughs from 1925 through Cather’s late life and by a diary documenting her in-person interactions with Cather from 1925 through 1927.
Cather, Charles Fectigue (1848-1928). Cather’s father.
Charles Fectigue (possibly Fectique) Cather was born in the Back
Creek Valley of Virginia, north of Winchester. His family were sheep raisers
who were largely, but not entirely, Union supporters during the Civil War.
He married Mary Virginia Seibert Boak, daughter of Confederate supporters,
in 1872. In 1883 he and his family followed his parents, William and
Caroline Cather, and brother George to Webster County in Nebraska, where
various cousins and uncles had also settled. Initially he ran a ranch in the
county but soon moved his family into the town of Red Cloud, where he had an
insurance and real estate business. Four of his children, Willa, Roscoe,
Charles, and Jessica, were born in Virginia, while three, James, Elsie, and
John, were born in Nebraska. Cather’s relationship with her father was very
warm: she made regular visits to her parents in Red Cloud and especially
enjoyed her father’s letters expressing appreciation of her novels. A week
after she concluded a visit to her ailing father in Red Cloud, he died of
heart disease. He served as the prototype for Hillary Templeton in “Old Mrs.
Harris” (1932).
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, Lillie Gould (1858-1928). Edith Lewis's mother. Born to New England Quaker parents who had recently migrated to the Midwest, Lillie Gould was sent east from Davenport, IA, to Elmira, NY, to be educated. In 1879, she and Henry Euclid Lewis, a New Hampshire-born, Dartmouth-educated lawyer from Moline, IL, married in the Davenport Unitarian Church. In 1881, they relocated with their first child, Harold Gould Lewis, to Lincoln, NE, where Lillie soon gave birth to Edith. She had four more children while in Lincoln: Helen, Ruth, and two others who died in childhood there. She was an active clubwoman engaged in social reform issues. In 1909, after the collapse of Henry’s various business enterprises in Nebraska, the family moved to the Boston, MA, area. Around 1923, Lillie moved in with their daughter Ruth in Brooklyn, NY, while Henry went to live with their daughter Helen in California. In the summer of 1927, she suffered a stroke while visiting Harold and his family in Springfield, MA, where she died in May 1928.
Newman, Frances (1883-1928). American librarian, critic, and novelist. Born and raised in Atlanta, GA, in an elite white family, Frances Newman was educated at finishing schools in Washington, DC, and New York City and was an Atlanta debutante in the 1903 season. She graduated from the Atlanta Carnegie Library School and began her career as a critic publishing reviews in the Carnegie Library Bulletin. Her first published short story, “Rachel’s Children” (American Mercury, 1924), won an O. Henry Memorial Prize. She was awarded a MacDowell Colony residency in 1926 to complete her novel The Hard Boiled Virgin, which appeared in the fall of 1926. Cather was also a MacDowell resident that summer, and Newman reviewed Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) for the New York Evening Post. In Dead Lovers are Faithful Lovers (1928), Newman continued her exploration of the inner lives of white Southern women, casting a jaded eye on the elite white culture in which she was raised. She died shortly before her translation of Six Moral Tales from Jules Leforgue appeared.
West, Rebecca (1892-1983). British novelist, journalist, and critic. Born in Kerry, Ireland, to a Scotch mother and Anglo-Irish father, Cicely Isabel Fairfield trained in London as an actress, where she took the name Rebecca West from the heroine of Henrik Ibsen’s play Rosmerhsholm (1886). As a journalist writing for the Freewoman and the Clarion West promoted women’s suffrage and socialist causes and argued against British imperialism. She also became a powerful literary critic, writing reviews for both British and American periodicals. and an important modernist fiction writer. Her first novel, The Return of the Soldier (1918), explored the effect of the trauma of World War I from the perspective of the sister of a combat veteran. Her Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941) is considered a masterpiece of British travel writing. In her later life, West abandoned her early radicalism and was created a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1959. Cather had met West by early 1927, and later that year West positively reviewed Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) for the New York Herald Tribune Books. Cather continued to cultivate West as a critic, ensuring that she got copies of her books, leading to West’s positive review of Shadows on the Rock (1931).
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
"A Reservationist's Impressions of Willa Cather's New Mexican Catholic Missionaries of 1850," New York Evening Post, The Literary Review (September 3, 1927) by Frances Newman
Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) by Willa Cather
"Miss Cather's Business as an Artist," New York Herald Tribune (September 1927) by Rebecca West
