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've thought of you often since I arrived here July 20th. My conscience was uneasy because I had never told you how much I enjoyed reading the diary of your ancestress about her terrible crossing of the Atlantic4. The last weeks in town3 were hectic; I was arranging the serial publication of "Lucy"5 and doing what I could to help old friends6 in Nebraska7 who were actually in want.
Even here the summer has been unusually dry. Most of the time this island has been a shining gold spot in a blue sea. I have just finished reading the galley proofs of "Lucy" and I think better of it than I did when it was a messy corrected manuscript. The kinks of a thing come out in type.
Last night came your letter with distressing news. However ⬩W⬩S⬩C⬩ did Mr. Burroughs8 pick up that bug? I suspect it was by loafing too little and painting too much. But if you have your own bungalow, and he is writing, then he is living and not merely being sick. And he's doing the Pre-Raphaelites! They always seemed so beautiful and legendary to me when I knew their work in re-production only. But when I went to England9 first and saw their WORKS! Such awful color, I've never got over the shock of it. I mean Burne-Jones10 and Rossetti11—seems as if they mixed a little mud in their paint. I remember awful greens, and ladies,--pure Virgins with mouldy complexions. These painters should be engraved, always, and their canvases kept in a locked gallery for students only.
I'm doing nothing, and thinking about nothing but the weather. I've been reading a lot of Anatole France12 over because I happen to have a lot of his books up here. Speaking of cycles of taste, he's despised in France13 now, you know. They shrug and say "Oh yes, a virtuoso."
Oh you, I've only a few Shakespeares14 up here—not the "Merchant"15. A lost line torments me; what is the second line of Morocco's speech which begins16, Mislike me not for my complexion, The - - livery of the - - sun, To whom I am a neighbor and (near bred (?) I try supplying various adjectives, but with him it's dangerous to substitute.
With love and good wishes to you both, and recommending toddy for the invalid.
Yours W. S. C. From W. S. Cather WHALE COVE GRAND MANAN2 NEW BRUNSWICK CANADA Mrs. Bryson Burroughs1 Potts Memorial Hospital Livingston, Columbia County New York3 U. S. A. NORTH HEAD N. B.2 AUG 30 1934 AMInformation about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let2904.xml
- Letter identifier
- 2904
- Contents
- Document is two leaves, handwritten on recto only of first leaf and on recto and verso of second leaf. Includes one handwritten envelope.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Louise Guerber Burroughs1
- Date letter was written
- August 29 [1934]
- Place letter was written
- Grand Manan, New Brunswick, Canada2
- Location of original letter
- Willa Cather Collection (Burroughs 26), Drew University Library, Special Collections and Archives, Madison, NJ
Individual Annotations
The second quoted line should read "The shadowed livery of the burnished sun." Cather's memory of the third line is correct.
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.
Lambrecht, Charlotte Preussner (1851-1941). Cather’s Webster County neighbor and friend. Charlotte Preussner was born in Germany and came with members of her family to the U.S. She married Carl F. Lambrecht in 1874 in Freeport, IL. The Lambrechts came to the Catherton area of Webster County, NE, in 1878, homesteading south of the Cather family’s lands. Their eight children were similar in age to the children of the Charles Cather family. In later life, Charlotte Lambrecht was one of the old friends to whom Willa Cather would send presents.
0094
Seymour, Elizabeth (c. 1859-1934) (“Bess,” “Bessie”). Cather’s
cousin. Bess Seymour was born in Virginia to Sarah Boak (the
elder sister of Willa Cather’s mother) and her first husband, Joseph D.
Seymour. In 1883, Bess moved with Willa Cather’s family to Webster County,
NE. Seymour lived in the Cather family home from 1883 to 1904, when she
moved to the Webster County farm of her half brother, Will Andrews. Cather
used her cousin’s name as a byline for the story “The Burglar’s Christmas”
(1906), and it has been suggested that she served as a model for Aunt Tillie
in The Song of the Lark (1915). Cather frequently
mentions in letters to other family members that she received long letters
from Seymour full of family news, and she urged her sister Elsie Cather to
care for Seymour during her final illness and sent money to pay medical
expenses.
Andrews, William (“Will”) Lee (1865-1950). Cather’s cousin; farmer. William Andrews was born in Frederick County, VA, son of Sarah Ellen Boak Seymour Andrews and her second husband, Joseph Andrews, and the brother of Nannie V. Andrews Matheny and half-brother of Elizabeth (“Bess”) Seymour. He came to Webster County “in his early youth,” according to his obituary, and farmed in the Batin and Catherton precincts all his life. He gave a home to his mother and sister for the latter parts of their lives.
Burroughs, Bryson (1869-1934). American painter and curator. Born in Massachusetts and raised in Ohio, Bryson Burroughs studied painting at the Art Students League in New York City and then in Paris under Luc-Olivier Merson and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. He became Curator of Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1909 but also continued to paint and exhibit his own works. He is known for increasing American holdings at the museum. Burroughs married sculptor Edith Woodman in 1893; the couple had two children before she died in 1916. In 1928, he married Louise Guerber. He died of tuberculosis.
Burne-Jones, Edward Coley (1833-1898). British artist and designer. Edward Burne-Jones was educated at Exeter College, Oxford, where he first met his future artistic collaborator William Morris. After meeting Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who would also become a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, he left Oxford and trained as a painter under Rossetti. Burne-Jones featured medieval themes in his painting and also worked in the decorative arts, such as stained glass, and book illustration. On Cather’s first trip to Europe in 1902, she visited the late artist’s studio in London. She wrote about her visit for a Nebraska State Journal column, and it inspired her short story “The Marriage of Phaedra” (1905).
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1828-1882). British poet and painter. Born in London to an Italian political refugee father and an English-Italian mother, Dante Gabriel Rosetti trained at the Royal Academy. Influential as a painter as a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, he devoted equal time to writing poetry (his brother William was a writer and critic and his sister Christina a poet). Like other Pre-Raphaelite painters, he emulated Renaissance art, and his best-known paintings are of women identified as from the Bible or from works of Renaissance literature.
France, Anatole (1844-1924) ("Jacques Anatole Thibault"). French novelist. Born in Paris, France, Jacques Thibault, writing under the pseudonym Anatole France, was a prolific author in many genres but especially the novel. His first great success as a novelist was Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard (1881), which earned a prize from the Académie Française. He became a member a member of the Académie in 1896, an event that Cather applauded as a young newspaper critic. She also praised his Thaïs (1890) as a “masterpiece of historic fiction.” In later years, France became a newspaper critic, promoting the virtues of the French classicism of the eighteenth century embodied in his works and criticizing French naturalism. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1921.
Shakespeare, William (1564-1616). English playwright, actor, and poet. Shakespeare is widely regarded as the greatest playwright of the English language. While not much is known definitively about his life, he was a member of Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a company of theatrical players, beginning in 1594 (the group later changed their name to the King’s Men). From 1590 to 1613, he wrote thirty-seven plays that continue to be widely performed. Cather’s lifelong love for Shakespeare’s work began in childhood as the Cather family had several volumes of Shakespeare in their book collection. While at the University of Nebraska, she took four semesters of Shakespeare and in 1891 published a two-part essay, “Shakespeare and Hamlet” in the Nebraska State Journal. Her fiction is filled with allusions to Shakespeare. In her later years, she formed an informal Shakespeare book club with the child prodigies Yehudi, Hepzibah, and Yaltah Menuhin and spent the last winter of her life reading his works.
Place Annotations
Grand Manan, New Brunswick, CanadaCather and Edith
Lewis frequently vacationed on Grand Manan Island during the summer and
early fall for about twenty years, beginning in 1922. For the first few
years, they stayed at the Inn at Whale Cove, a collection of cottages with a
main house operated by Sarah Jacobus. Cather and Lewis rented Orchardside
Cottage from Jacobus until they had their own cottage built. In 1926, Lewis
acquired land on Grand Manan, and construction was completed in 1928. Cather
and Lewis returned to this cottage almost every summer until
1940.
Work Annotations
Lucy Gayheart (1935) by Willa Cather
The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
