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 |
The window wedges were very welcome, but your little letter from Westport5 much more so. Is it possible, what you tell me? I thought you were still under thirty-five. You seemed so very young when I first met you. Do you know, I dread forty for you, a little. Forty itself is all right, about the best place in the scale, I think. But after forty the years roll up so damned fast. Will have to talk it over when I see you. I can talk more frankly if you've reached that keystone in the arch. I'm a little guarded with the very young—I don't like to destroy illusions; they are so nice while they last.
Please remind me to tell you something about The
Song
of
the
Lark6 when I see you. I have just just read it over for the first time in
(twenty years) (no, sixteen, to be accurate). and
it h
Excuse punctuation. Had to, for the subscription uniform edition7—put
it off as long as possible.
I'm looking forward to a happy reunion. I leave here2 on Friday.
With my love W. S. C. THE SHATTUCK INN3 AT THE FOOT OF MONADNOCK MOUNTAIN JAFFREY, N. H.2 Mrs. Bryson Burroughs1 106 East 81st Street New York, N. Y.4 JAFFREY N. H.2 NOV 4 1936 6 30 AMInformation about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let2912.xml
- Letter identifier
- 2912
- Contents
- Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto and verso. Includes one handwritten envelope.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Louise Guerber Burroughs1
- Date letter was written
- [November 3, 1936]
- 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
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).
Cather was working with Houghton Mifflin on the Autograph Edition of her collected works.
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.
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
The Song of the Lark (1915) by Willa Cather
