Author Archives: Sue Hallgarth

Posted by Sue Hallgarth on July 18, 2013

Cather had romantic “crushes” on her female school friends, fell deeply in love with a striking Pittsburgh girl, Isabelle McClung, and, after Isabelle’s marriage, spent much of her life with a devoted companion (and Cather’s first biographer), Edith Lewis. There are very few love letters in the Selected Letters, since Cather destroyed all her letters to Isabelle and seems hardly ever to have written to Edith.
—Hermione Lee, “Willa Cather: A Hidden Voice,” The New York Review of Books, July 11, 2013

•    •    •

In her July 11, 2013 review of The Selected Letters of Willa Cather,^[1] Dame Hermione Lee reminds us of the full range of critical battles over Cather’s life and work during the twenty-four years since Lee published her own Willa Cather: Double Lives (NY: Pantheon, 1989). The battles she describes range from frequently homophobic “hagiographical reverence” to views of “a Cather who belongs to the international modern world.” Lee sides with the modern world. On the issue of Cather’s “crushes,” however, Lee demonstrates an unfortunate acceptance of outdated assumptions: that Isabelle McClung, the Pittsburgh patroness with whose family Cather lived for five years, was the “great love of her life,” and that Edith Lewis, with whom Cather shared the last forty years of her life and who worked closely with Cather in shaping and editing her fiction, was merely her “devoted companion.” Continue reading …

Posted by Sue Hallgarth on May 31, 2013

An excerpt from an Interview with Andrew Jewell, co-editor of The Selected Letters of Willa Cather (Knopf, 2013) by Rebecca Cross in “A New Peek at Willa Cather’s Private Life,” The Big Read Blog, May 21, 2013:

What do you think the anthology reveals about Cather, both as a writer and as a woman?

JEWELL: To my mind, it upends a lot of the stereotypes about her. Many people saw her as sort of reserved, sometimes isolated and grumpy, and as a writer that didn’t have much to do with the world. I think the reality that the letters reveal is just the opposite. She was very vibrant, she was very connected to a wide circle of friends and family. She was funny in ways that people find surprising. You can’t deny when you read the letters the life you feel there on the page. It’s a nice counterbalance to some of the portrayals that have been in her biographies. I think the reason for that [portrayal] in her biographies is partially—consciously or subconsciously—what emerged from the inaccessibility of her correspondence.

•    •    •

Problematic Sources

The most reliable sources for information about Willa Cather have always been Cather’s surviving correspondence and the memoir Willa Cather Living by Edith Lewis, the woman who lived with Cather and shared her life for almost forty years. But until the recent publication of The Selected Letters, neither the letters nor Lewis’ memoir carried much weight in countering the stereotypes that have defined Willa Cather since her death in 1947 and all but buried her life partner, Edith Lewis. Continue reading …

Posted by Sue Hallgarth on May 9, 2013

Built in 1901-1903 for Sarah Fisk Bacon Harris (1821-1912), the Harris house was new when Willa Cather met Edith Lewis in Harris’ parlor. The Sarah Harris that Lewis talks about is Sarah B. Harris, who lived with her mother, Sarah Fisk Bacon Harris, in the new house. This house replaced the earlier Harris home, an Italianate house at the same location: 1630 K Street in Lincoln, Nebraska.

In the introduction to her memoir, Willa Cather Living (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953) Edith Lewis describes their meeting:

I first met Willa Cather in the summer of 1903. I had come home, having just graduated from an Eastern college [Smith], to Lincoln, Nebraska, where I was born and brought up. Willa Cather was spending that summer with her family in Red Cloud. On her way back to her teaching job in Pittsbugh, she stopped off for a few days in Lincoln to visit Sarah Harris, the editor of the Lincoln Courier, and it was at Miss Harris’ house that I first met her. Continue reading …

Posted by Sue Hallgarth on May 6, 2013

Now that Willa Cather’s selected letters are finally out, it comes as no surprise that reviewers are again raising questions about Cather’s sexual identity and her attitude toward “feminine friendships,” a term she used in an 1892 letter to Louise Pound. Tom Perrotta in his April 25, 2013 review of The Selected Letters of Willa Cather in The New York Times Book Review points to the 1893 letter in which Cather exuberantly describes her “one-handed” driving feat through the hay stacks with Louise Pound. Joan Acocella notes in her April 9, 2013 review in The New Yorker online, she first got interested in Cather after reading an article by Sharon O’Brien discussing Cather’s attitude toward “feminine friendships” and was later taken aback by the perfect storm of “queer theory” criticism that followed O’Brien’s 1987 biography of Cather. Continue reading …