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 |
Washington Place3. Plans for Mrs. Goudy1's coming to New York.
Had been home for some months. Judge McClung4 slowly dying—Miss Jewett5 ill in Boston6 after a stroke. Had visited her in preceding November. Had been to see her "last week". Now editor of McClures.7
Information about this letter:
- Source File:
- cat.let3331.xml
- Letter identifier
- 3331
- Contents
- Document is one handwritten leaf. In October 1947, Edith Lewis purchased from rare book and manuscript dealer Louise Stegner of Omaha, NE, forty-nine letters from Willa Cather to Alice E. D. Goudy dated from 1890 to 1930. Lewis summarized these letters in an unused daily diary volume. At a later date, she destroyed the originals of the letters, but the summaries of thirty-seven of the letters, dated from 1890 to 1915, survive.
- Person to whom letter was written
- Alice E. Dailey Goudy1
- Date letter was written
- February 23, 1909
- Place letter was written
- New York, New York, United States2
- Location of original letter
- Charles E. Cather Collection (MS350), University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries, Archives & Special Collections, Lincoln, NE
Individual Annotations
82 Washington Place (New York City): Cather's second apartment in New York City and the first one she shared with Edith Lewis, located in Greenwich Village in the Manhattan borough. Cather and Lewis lived here from 1908 to 1911.
Person Annotations
Goudy, Alice Estelle Dailey (1853-1937). Cather’s high school teacher
and friend. Alice Dailey grew up in Nemaha County, NE, where she
attended the Nebraska State Normal School at Peru, NE, which her father had
helped found. She married fellow teacher Alexander K. Goudy in 1882; both
taught at the Normal School. When they moved to Red Cloud, NE, in 1888, he
was superintendent of schools and she was the high school principal. She
encouraged Cather to attend the University of Nebraska. The Goudys moved to
Lincoln, NE, in 1891, when he was elected state superintendent of schools;
Alice Goudy was assistant, then deputy, state superintendent. After A.K.
Goudy suffered a stroke around 1900, the couple retired to Nemaha County.
Cather wrote to Mrs. Goudy for many years, although few letters have
survived.
McClung, Samuel A. (1845-1915) American jurist, Isabelle McClung’s father. Born in Alleghany County, PA, to a Presbyterian minister and his wife, Samuel McClung graduated from Washington College in 1863 and in 1868 was admitted to the bar and moved to Pittsburgh, PA. He was appointed Judge of the Court of Common Pleas in 1872 and was known for his conservatism. He married Fannie Merritt in 1874 and they had three children, Isabelle, Samuel Jr., and Edith. In 1901 Isabelle McClung invited Willa Cather to reside in the McClung family home in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, and she lived there until her 1906 move to New York City. Cather often returned there to write until Judge McClung’s death caused the sale of family home in 1916.
Jewett, Sarah Orne (1849-1909). American short story writer and
novelist. Born in South Berwick, ME, Jewett began sharing homes
in Boston (at 148 Charles Street) and Manchester-on-the-Sea, MA, with Annie
Adams Fields in 1881, while continuing to live in her family home in South
Berwick with her mother and sister part of the year. She was associated
throughout her career with the Atlantic Monthly, and
her best-known work, The Country of the Pointed Firs,
was serialized there in 1896. Like much of her fiction, it focused on rural
and small town New England life. By the time Cather met Jewett at 148
Charles Street in 1908, Jewett had largely ceased writing because of a
spinal concussion she suffered in a 1902 carriage accident. She wrote
important letters of advice to Cather in 1908, criticizing her decision to
write "The Gull's Road" (1908) from the perspective of a male character,
which she called "something of a masquerade" (27 Nov. 1908), and urging her
to give up her editorial work at McClure's Magazine
so she could focus full-time on fiction writing (13 Dec. 1908). After
Jewett's death in South Berwick in 1909, Cather often referred to her and
her advice about writing. Cather edited The Best Stories
of Sarah Orne Jewett (1925) for publisher Houghton Mifflin, and in
her preface classed The Country of the Pointed Firs
with Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Nathaniel
Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter as one of "three
American books which have the possibility of a long, long life."
Place Annotations
Work Annotations
McClure's Magazine
