Editing Willa Cather’s Letters for Digital Publication: A Dialogue

Melissa Homestead and Emily Rau have spent the past decade collaborating with Andrew Jewell and a team at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to create the Complete Letters of Willa Cather. With 2,800 letters published at the time of this writing, the Complete Letters is an ongoing digital scholarly edition of all known letters written by American author Willa Cather. The edition features full transcriptions of the letters, detailed annotations, high-quality scans, and sophisticated searching and faceting functionality that allows for multiple access points to the materials. Most of these letters have never been published before, and this edition will continue to have a significant impact on Cather scholarship and studies of American literature. In this dialogue, Homestead and Rau reflect on their experiences working with these materials, on Cather and her various contexts, and on digital humanities practices and methodologies.

Melissa

My first encounter with Willa Cather’s letters took place in a physical archive in 1993. I had been an enthusiastic and repeat reader of Cather’s works for more than a decade but was new to archival research. At this point in time, the provisions of Cather’s will preventing publication of or quotation from her letters were still in effect, a prohibition scholars worked around by resorting to paraphrase. I was trying to make an argument about sexuality in a scene in her World War I novel One of Ours (1922), in which protagonist Claude Wheeler kills a German sniper and finds a locket around his neck with a miniature of a young man in it. I was curious about biographer James Woodress’s paraphrase of a Cather letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher about the scene. “Cather told Fisher,” Woodress writes, “that this incident was related to her by an American captain, who had no idea that the young man in the picture was the German officer’s lover. She liked the naivete of the American officer and gave his innocence to Claude.” Earlier in his reference to this scene, Woodress used the word “homosexuality,” and I was curious what word Cather herself had used.

Most libraries and archives holding Cather letters took the provisions of Cather’s will quite seriously, even refusing to make photocopies for research purposes, so I drove the nearly 400 miles from suburban Philadelphia to Burlington, VT, where the University of Vermont held Fisher’s papers. As long as I had driven all that distance, I decided to read as many of Cather’s letters to her friend as I could. Thus I had my first taste of the peculiar experience of what I have come to call “reading dead people’s mail.” Cather and Dorothy Canfield first met in Lincoln, NE, in the early 1890s, when Cather was a student at the University of Nebraska and Canfield’s father, James Hulme Canfield, was the university chancellor. In 1902, when Cather made her first trip to Europe, Canfield was conducting research in France for her doctorate in Romance languages. Imagine my surprise, as a novice archival researcher, laboriously taking notes with pencil on lined paper, when I encountered an August 1902 Cather letter about underwear shopping (fig. 1). Cather described how she, Isabelle McClung (with whom she was traveling), and Evelyn Osborne (Canfield’s Columbia University grad school classmate) had “purchased many foolish underclothing.” It wasn’t just frou frou French underwear that concerned Cather. She closed the letter referring to more sensible American underwear and imploring Canfield to speak to their laundress “about our washing. The woman failed to return a new suit of union underwear that I paid much good money for.”

Woodress often quite closely paraphrases Cather’s language, but I learned in Vermont that his paraphrase of Cather’s later letter to her friend about One of Ours little resembled Cather’s original language. Fisher had read the novel in proof, and answering her query about where she got the “details” of the war scenes, Cather explained, "I got a great deal of it in the hospital here, winter of 1918, when a lot of Western boys lay here in the Polyclinic all winter with no one to talk to and were so glad to talk to me. Such clear, vivid memories come back to sick men. The young captain who killed the degenerate German officer didn't know what it meant, that was why I used it, it seemed so sweet. He had his wonderful rings etc.” In the process of paraphrase, then, Woodress translated “degenerate” to “homosexual.” Of course, Cather’s original letter is not self-explanatory, and Woodress’s substitution is a reasonable interpretive choice. However, his choice obscured other possible interpretations by those unwilling or unable to travel to Vermont. The publication of The Complete Letters of Willa Cather on the Willa Cather Archive allows anyone with an internet connection to access Cather’s original language freely and make their own interpretive judgments. (Throughout this post, we liberally link not just to letters but to the many other resources available on the Willa Cather Archive site).

Emily

My first encounter with Willa Cather’s letters was quite different from Melissa’s and came from being assigned to work for the Willa Cather Archive as a graduate research assistant for the first two years of my PhD program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This happened to be the same summer (2014) that the previous editor of the Cather Archive, Andrew Jewell, received a Scholarly Editions and Translations grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for the first phase of the Complete Letters, a grant which funded my assistantship. While I completed my doctoral coursework, I scanned all of Cather’s letters held here at UNL, at the Nebraska State Historical Society (materials that have now been transferred to the National Willa Cather Center), and most of the letters held in the Dobkin Family Collection of Feminism. Through this work, I handled the original materials, felt the texture of the paper beneath my fingertips, saw Cather’s handwriting on birchbark, on newspaper clippings, on quick notes to friends and loved ones (fig. 2). In many cases, I interacted with the other side of the correspondence as well, scanning carbon copies of letters to Cather from her publishers at Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., handling letters from Cather’s closest brother, Roscoe, and from the Menuhin family. Sometimes these collections even contained letters to Edith Lewis, Willa Cather’s partner, from the same correspondents as those to whom Cather was writing, showing the closeness of their relationship. I carefully took one folder at a time out of an archival storage box, laid it flat, and flipped through one page at a time, making high quality scans of each leaf. I made friends with the archivists and learned proper archival practice (once on a break from scanning, the University Archivist, Mary Ellen Ducey, even brought out a small collection from when Bruce Springsteen performed on campus in 1984 after we bonded over our shared love for The Boss).

In between scanning, I also worked on encoding the letters in TEI, which I will explain in more detail below. Although quite a few students worked on this part of the process, Gabi Kirilloff (who received her PhD from UNL and is now a faculty member at Washington University in St. Louis) and I encoded the majority of Cather’s letters, tagging people, places, and referenced works as we went, and thinking through how to mark up the material and formal qualities of the letters. The first collection I worked on was the Roscoe and Meta Cather Collection housed here at UNL. This collection contains letters from Willa Cather to her brother Roscoe, his wife, Meta Schaper Cather, and their three children. I spent the first few months working on the letters to Roscoe’s three daughters, Virginia and the twins, Margaret and Elizabeth. At a time when I had only read one Cather novel, A Lost Lady (1923), during my MA coursework in Pennsylvania, I read and encoded so many letters from Cather to her “darling twinnies,” like this 1937 letter thanking them for sending candy “at a time when we needed cheering.”

By working so closely with these letters, I was privileged to have a glimpse at “Aunt Willie,” as Cather signed her letters to her nieces, well before I started to understand Cather as the American literary giant she has come to be. Despite common (mis)conceptions of Cather as a reclusive, solitary artist, the Cather I came to know was one who was very embedded in her family, who so sweetly loved the three girls growing up in the West. The letters plan and recall Cather’s vacations with her three nieces in the Southwest and Wyoming and when Cather and Lewis later hosted the twins on Grand Manan Island when they were in college. She attended their graduations, celebrated their marriages and the births of their children, and wrote about them so fondly to her many friends. As someone desperately missing my home and family on the east coast, these letters were little consolations, written by a woman looking across the same distance but from the opposite direction as she recalled her childhood with her siblings and missed her parents and wrote fondly to friends and family members who remained in Nebraska. The letter to all three nieces after the death of their father in 1945 brings tears to my eyes every time I read it: “I write you because I knew your father so much longer than you knew him, so much longer than even your mother knew him.” Describing hardships in their family and community following the financial crisis and drought of 1893, Cather remembers how much Roscoe did for their family and writes to his daughters, “Things looked very dark but we were always so happy to be together that we carried the troubles rather lightly.” This is the Cather I came to know in my first two years working on the Complete Letters. After a semester of this work, I read all of Cather’s books, and she eventually made her way into my dissertation, contributing to the shift in my period of study forward from early American literature to late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. Her stories landed differently for me than they would have if I hadn’t spent so much time with Aunt Willa before I encountered her fictional characters, Mrs. Harris, Ántonia Shimerda, Lucy Gayheart, and Anton Rosicky.

Melissa

Between our two stories, between my 1993 drive to Vermont and Emily's 2014 encoding of Cather's letters to her nieces, a lot of work and important contexts unfolded. That work began when Janis Stout, in writing Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World (2000), collected and transcribed all 1,817 letters then known to scholars. Unable to produce a print edition of these letters because of the provisions of Cather’s will, she conceived the idea of the print Calendar of the Letters of Willa Cather (2002), which listed the letters in what she believed to be their chronological order, with brief summaries of the contents of each letter. The volume also featured a biographical directory with very brief entries for known correspondents and a robust series of indices: addressees, names and titles mentioned, and repositories. Several years later, Andrew Jewell began collaborating with Stout on a digital edition of the calendar. Shifting to a digital format allowed for more sophisticated searching and sorting than was possible with the print index, as well as allowing for revision and expansion. Expansion became particularly salient when the Roscoe and Meta Cather Collection arrived at UNL in early 2007, adding nearly 400 letters to the known body of Cather’s correspondence. Revision often entailed assigning new dates to letters: Cather, much to our continuing frustration, often did not date her letters. Beginning with the print Calendar, each letter has been assigned a unique four-digit identifier. Initially, Janis Stout assigned these numbers in a chronological order sometimes based on conjecture. However, as the number of known letters has increased, letters have been assigned an ID number as they have been added, first to the Calendar in digital form and now to the Complete Letters. We have kept these ID numbers consistent for individual letters, rather than reordering them as the chronology changed, and we encourage people to use these identifiers when citing Cather's letters. These numbers thus have since assumed a different function as unique identifiers: every newly-discovered letter, regardless of its date, is assigned a number at the end of the existing sequence, which has grown beyond 3,000.

In 2011 a new entity to manage Cather’s copyrights was established following the death of Cather’s nephew Charles Cather, the last executor of the literary trust established in the author’s will. The newly-created Willa Cather Trust decided to lift the ban on the publication of and quotation from Cather’s letters, allowing for the publication of The Selected Letters of Willa Cather (2013), edited by Jewell and Stout. Between the publication of the Calendar and the Selected Letters, the most notable addition to the corpus of known letters after the Roscoe Cather donation were Cather’s letters to publisher Alfred Knopf and staff of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., long assumed to have been destroyed by him (on the scope of Cather’s correspondence with both Alfred and Blanche Knopf and gaps yet to be filled, see my essay in the Willa Cather Review). A robust selection of the Knopf letters was included in the Selected Letters. Aiming for readability, Jewell and Stout divided the letters into chapters with contextual headnotes, as well as briefer headnotes (rather than footnotes or endnotes) to provide information on people, events, and literary works mentioned in some letters. They also provided a biographical directory, some information about where letters are held, and a robust print index by name and titles of works.

In anticipation of Cather’s letters entering the public domain seventy years after her 1947 death, in 2013 Jewell applied for a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for the Complete Letters of Willa Cather. Following a process we will describe in detail in the next few sections, the Cather Archive editorial team began digital publication of about half the letters in January 2018, with the second half being supported by a second NEH grant received in 2019. Currently, we have published nearly ninety percent of the known letters.

Emily

Editing and creating a digital scholarly edition like the Complete Letters involves an immense amount of work even before a single letter is published online. The first problem to deal with is how to keep track of the ever-growing number of letters spread across over one hundred repositories around the world. The incredible development team in the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH) at UNL created the Cather Tracking Database to store digital images of letters, keep track of metadata (structured information for identifying a resource), and generate the unique identifier for each new letter as it is added to the database. Each letter has its own entry in the database, which records information about the repository and collection, as well as metadata for each letter, including the date, recipient, and other notes of use to encoders or annotators. We used these entries as starting points for encoding the letters, in addition to existing transcriptions inherited from Janis Stout and created by other scholars along the way, including Andy, Melissa, and me. Editorial assistants on the project encoded the letters in TEI, which stands for the Text Encoding Initiative. The TEI is an international consortium that develops guidelines for encoding machine-readable texts in XML (which stands for Extensible Markup Language) to make them interoperable with other TEI projects. Encoding Cather’s letters in TEI keeps the content or data of the edition in a static form that is separate from design and display conversations and decisions. The TEI XML files are transformed using XSLT into HTML files that can be displayed online and are styled with CSS. This ensures that as trends and standards change in web design, the text of the letters and the data associated with each letter remain stable and unaffected, while design and display changes can be made during the transformation or stylization process.

Encoding in TEI involves using tags to mark the formal elements of a text (paragraphs, salutations, block quotes, etc.) and to describe the metadata for a document (location, date, type of document, etc.). The TEI guidelines allow encoders to get quite granular while tagging elements of a text, marking changes in hand, additions or deletions, underlining, letterhead, and many other things. For a project like the Complete Letters, we follow the guidelines while also creating documentation outlining how we use tags and describe elements in our project specifically. We also made the choice to tag every person, place, and work Cather mentions in her letters. We have lists for each of these categories encoded in TEI as well, and each person, place, and work has a unique identifier linked to regularized names, metadata, and sometimes annotations for each item. For every recipient and every person mentioned in the letters, we have written biographical annotations with details about their life and their relationship (if any) to Cather. These biographical annotations are encoded in a separate TEI file that is linked to the personography file, which contains the identifiers for each person tagged in the letters. We decided to make this process separate from the letter annotation process, because we knew early on that most of the biographical annotations would be reused and we wanted to regularize these brief biographies. 

After we had encoded quite a few letters and written some biographical annotations, we approached the CDRH development team with a new problem: how do we annotate the individual letters when not everyone on the project is familiar with TEI or technologically comfortable? Our development team created a software playfully named Annotonia (blending “annotation” with My Ántonia) that allows users to collaboratively write and review annotations, flag needed corrections to the encoding, and automatically generate the file containing all the annotations (for more detailed information, see Annotonia: Annotations from Browser to TEI). These individual annotations are assigned a unique identifier, making them searchable and reusable in more than one letter. This allows us to reuse an annotation for Cather’s 5 Bank Street apartment, for example, each time it’s mentioned in a letter rather than rewriting the annotation. Once a letter is fully annotated, the TEI file for the letter is exported out of Annotonia marked with things that need to be corrected and with encoding added for new annotations, and a TEI file of all the annotations is generated. These are then brought into the Complete Letters development site for final review by me, after which I publish the letters on the production site, usually in batches of 100 letters. All of these elements and more come together in the background to create the interface you see when you use the Complete Letters, and this labor allows for sophisticated searching and faceting of the entire edition.

Melissa

So how does all of the work Emily describes produce a different result for users than a print scholarly edition of an author’s letters? The Selected Letters of Willa Cather was designed as a trade book—it is not a full-dress scholarly edition. The ongoing print scholarly edition of Ernest Hemingway’s letters is perhaps a better example. In the back of each volume, a user will find:

• A Roster of Correspondents that lists them all alphabetically with brief biographies;
• A Calendar of Letters that lists all letters in the volume chronologically and gives additional information not presented alongside the edited letter texts, namely form (typed, handwritten, cable); location of source text; and any previous publication of a letter;
• An index of recipients; and
• A general index.

Notably, the apparatus accompanying each volume applies only to that published volume, not to Hemingway’s entire corpus of letters. Consulting the index of Volume 4, which covers 1929 to 1931, the indices reveal no extant letters to Willa Cather and only one mention of her: in a letter of October 31, 1929, to magazine editor Robert Bridges, Hemingway wrote to introduce him to Spanish writer Victor Llona and mentioned Cather as one of the American authors Llona had translated (137–138). (Hemingway’s infamous 1923 letter to Edmund Wilson dismissing One of Ours as inauthentic because Cather had no battlefield experience is in volume 2.)

The kind of tagging we have done for the Complete Letters affords users functionality unavailable to those consulting such a print edition and, as far as we know, beyond the affordances of any digital editions of authors’ letters. Tagging enables users to interact with letters in a much more sophisticated way than print indices allow and can surface patterns across letters not visible in a print edition or, indeed, in digital editions that largely replicate the structure of print letter editions. Searching the words of Cather’s letters as she wrote them is exciting after years of not being able to quote those words, but it is the human judgment exercised in tagging that adds value. For example, Cather refers to her partner, Edith Lewis, in many ways. She’s “Edith,” “Miss Lewis,” “my friend,” or even implied in “we.” Deciding to tag “we” or “my friend” as Lewis (as in this September 1917 letter to Cather’s aunt Frances Smith Cather in which Lewis is “my friend”) requires an understanding of Cather’s relationships with particular correspondents and her and Lewis’s movements as documented across Cather’s body of correspondence and in other sources.

When I first began researching my book on their relationship, many people told me that Lewis was barely mentioned in Cather’s letters. Tagging reveals that nothing could be further from the truth. A user who browses the Complete Letters by “People Mentioned” will find that Edith Lewis is the third most mentioned person. The first and second most mentioned people are her publisher Alfred Knopf and her brother Roscoe Cather (most of the others in the top range are members of her biological family). “People Mentioned” and “Recipients” are overlapping categories—addressing a letter to a person counts as a mention. Roscoe Cather and Alfred Knopf rank second and third as recipients, while there are only a handful of extant letters to Lewis. Encoding mentions of Lewis, then, surfaces her presence in Cather’s epistolary corpus and her life. Early in the process of deciding policy for the Complete Letters we decided on this policy of, whenever possible, tagging people who Cather does not mention by name, effectively pushing beyond the level of indexing provided by the print Selected Letters. Take, for example, a 1925 letter to Mabel Dodge Luhan, written after she and Lewis had spent time at Luhan’s compound in Taos. Cather begins by referring to “the only ugly things we saw in Taos” (emphasis added) and concludes “we’d like to start right back to Taos” (Lewis wrote an equally effusive letter to Luhan the same day). The Selected Letters index does not note this as a reference to Lewis, but because we tagged Lewis on the initial use of the first-person plural pronoun, a user who clicks on “we” will find a biographical annotation for Lewis and know that Lewis was with Cather in this moment; this letter is also in the browsing results for all letters mentioning Lewis.

While a print edition may note the place each individual letter was written (at least if the writer of the letter included this information), we have tagged the (sometimes conjectured) place from which Cather wrote each letter and included the geographic information for this place, which allows users to track Cather’s movements. With always the caveat that any claims are based on currently known/extant letters, it is interesting to note that Cather wrote nearly two thirds of her letters from New York City, while Grand Manan Island (where she and Edith Lewis owned a vacation cottage), her Nebraska hometown of Red Cloud, Jaffrey, New Hampshire (where Cather liked to stay at the Shattuck Inn in the fall), and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (where she lived full-time from 1896 to 1906 and visited for another decade) trail far behind.

This location information only goes so far—perhaps Cather was physically in a place but did not write any letters while there, or she may have written letters that did not survive. We also tag places mentioned, however, which provides additional clues about her movement. For example, Cather wrote S. S. McClure in 1912 from Arizona that she and her brother Douglass were “going over to Old Mexico” (fig. 3).  However, she never wrote a letter from there, and, absent other documentary evidence (such as photographs, newspaper articles, or government records), we can’t be sure whether she crossed the border. Users can, however, find Cather’s reference to Mexico in this letter by browsing the index of places mentioned.

The extensive work of tagging places also allowed us to spot Cather’s lies and evasions about her movements and to provide this information to users in annotations. In 1912, that Cather and her brother, who worked for the railroad, might have hopped a train from Winslow to “Old Mexico” seems plausible. Another reference to a trip to Mexico in a letter to the same Robert Bridges to whom Hemingway mentions Cather seems more like an evasion. On June 6, 1926, Cather wrote a brief and enigmatic letter to Bridges from Santa Fe claiming she couldn’t reply to him in person in New York because she was “on her way to Mexico.” The number of incoming letters Cather herself saved is relatively small, but publishers often saved their outgoing carbons. The Charles Scribner’s Sons archive at Princeton University has three carbons of 1926 letters from Bridges to Cather, and annotations for Cather’s letter summarize Bridges’s side of the correspondence. The first annotation begins with a brief summary of his first letter as a context for Cather’s response: “On 4 June 1926, Bridges wrote requesting an in-person meeting to present ‘an idea’ to Cather.” Cather’s secretary, Sarah Bloom, often forwarded business correspondence, and if there is one thing I’ve learned from my editorial work on the letters it is that mail moved with remarkable speed in the early years of the twentieth century. Two days after Bridges wrote, Cather responded from Santa Fe that she could not meet him in person because she was “on [her] way to Mexico and [would] not be in New York before October.” Undeterred by her report of her imminent trip to Mexico, Bridges wrote again on June 12, telling Cather (as the annotation summarizes) “that he was seeking a short story of 6,000 or 8,000 words for Scribner's Magazine.” As another annotation notes, “There is no evidence that Cather planned a trip to Mexico in 1926 although she did leave the Southwest sooner than planned in July.” And, indeed, Cather reconsidered her earlier evasive maneuver and did see Bridges during her time in New York City in July before she went north to the MacDowell Colony: “He wrote again on 23 November 1926, reminding her of their in-person meeting in July and reporting that Don Marquis, John Galsworthy, and Joseph Hergesheimer had promised stories.” Nothing came of the meeting, however—the only short story Cather ever published in Scribner’s was “A Death in the Desert” in 1903. The annotations of this letter and the place tagging of other letters from the summer of 1926 allow users to track Cather’s movements without being waylaid by the isolated reference to an imminent (and likely illusory) trip to Mexico.

Emily

To return to our treatment of people in Cather’s letters, Melissa described how our practice of tagging direct and indirect references to people helps make Edith Lewis more visible in Cather’s life. This applies to other people as well, including Isabelle McClung (later Hambourg), Dorothy Canfield (later Fisher), many Cather family members, and others we could confidently know were traveling or in the room with Cather at a particular moment. As we started writing the more than 2,200 biographical annotations included in the edition, we decided to prioritize people who are historically underrepresented in scholarship and historical records. Rather than writing lengthy, detailed biographies for all the well-known people with whom Cather corresponded or about whom she wrote (which we certainly could have done), we made the decision to keep the annotations brief for people who are easy to find in a basic internet search and instead focus on the specific relationship (if any) between that person and Cather. The more detailed biographical annotations tend to go to people who are otherwise typically underrepresented in the historical record: women, immigrants, domestic workers, editors, and others. Our biographical annotation for Hemingway, to return to Melissa’s example and as seen in this 1943 letter to Alfred A. Knopf, identifies him simply: “A member of the Lost Generation of expatriate American artists who lived in France after World War I, Hemingway is known for his stripped-down prose style and his depictions of the war and its aftermath.” The annotation goes on to describe Hemingway’s criticism of Cather’s One of Ours and notes that there is no evidence the two authors met. We do not describe Hemingway’s career in detail, comment on his personal life, or list his published works, although we do mention that he, like Cather, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction after Cather’s death. 

Annie Sadilek Pavelka’s biographical annotation is quite different from Hemingway’s. As readers of this 1936 letter to Pavelka can see when clicking on her name, we have identified Pavelka’s family members, followed her movements from Bohemia to Nebraska, noted where she worked, whom she married, how many children she had (also all identified and annotated in the edition), and described her relationship with Cather. This particular letter is a great one for illustrating the long relationship Cather maintained with Pavelka, who served as the prototype for Ántonia Shimerda in Cather’s most beloved novel My Ántonia (1918). Cather wrote this letter almost twenty years after the publication of that novel and forty years after she moved out of Nebraska, and it illustrates the continued warm relationship between the two women. As our annotation notes, Cather sent gifts to the Pavelka family, and in this letter she notes that she wants to cover the cost of Pavelka’s new washer, asking that they refer to it as “Willie’s Washer.” “You know, I am not very fond of my real name, Willa,” Cather writes, “and I always am pleased when Carrie [Miner Sherwood] and Mary Miner [Creighton], and the people who knew me when I was little, call me ‘Willie,’ as my mother and father did. Nowhere else in the world do people call me by that name - just a few of the older people about Red Cloud.” Moments like this highlight Cather’s continued connectedness to the meaningful people from her childhood who in many ways inspired parts of her writing throughout her life.

While this edition contributes to efforts to recover the stories of women and immigrants on the Great Plains, especially those whose experiences helped shaped Cather’s enduring representations of the region, we have also dedicated time to researching and portraying the lives of people Cather may not have known as well or those she mentions only in passing. For example, our associate editor Kari Ronning identified Walter Saracino, mentioned by Cather in a 1925 letter to Mabel Dodge Luhan as “the bold Indian boy, Sarissino” who “would even try to get us through eighteen miles of lake and mud to Acoma.” In Ronning’s biographical annotation, she reports that Walter Saracino was a Laguna Pueblo man and a survivor of Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the first boarding school in what became a national network of schools dedicated to assimilating Indigenous children and training them in agricultural and domestic trades. Carlisle and similar schools practiced cultural genocide against Indigenous children, and the United States has only just begun to reckon with their devastating legacy in Indigenous communities. Although Cather misspells his name in her letter, Ronning was able to identify Saracino after reading Lewis’s recollections in Willa Cather Living when she identifies “our driver, a Carlisle College Indian named Mr. Sarascino” (146). The Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center at Dickinson College is at work digitizing and publishing materials and resources related to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, including Walter Saracino’s student file. Our work to make these types of encounters and connections visible opens the way for new questions and considerations in the study of Cather and her work.

Melissa

Very early in the process, as we were establishing standards for biographical annotations, as a feminist literary historian I decreed that the phrase “never married” would never appear in a biographical annotation because it is a phrase only ever applied to women and which implies a teleology—marriage is the natural end of a woman’s life. We also made sure to identify women by all of the names by which they were known across the course of their lives because the conventions of heteropatriarchy tend to make women disappear in the historical record. This approach is in line with efforts by archives to provide better, more complete metadata information about women, such as this effort at Yale. My favorite example is the woman who married Cather’s editor at Houghton Mifflin, Ferris Greenslet. In the earliest extant letter from Cather to him in 1908, she refers to his wife only as “your lady.” I had a deuce of a time finding her, but I finally found her and all her names. Ella Stoothoff Hulst Greenslet, it turns out, published a novel under the name Eleanor Stoothoff. Her identity as the author of a novel also proved key to understanding an otherwise obscure reference in a 1914 Cather letter  She wrote to Greenslet that the title of the novel she was just finishing “is still uncertain. What would you think of ‘The Song of the Lark’ with apologies to the author of ‘The Nightingale’.” A reader of this letter who clicks on “the author” will find a biography of Ella Greenslet, and a click on the title gives a full version of it: The Nightingale: A Lark (1914), by Ellenor Stoothoff.

While we have self-consciously adopted feminist practices for editing Cather, the letters themselves confirm my sense that Cather herself was not a feminist. When answering a letter from sociology professor Read Bain in 1931, she opined, “of course, as you intimate, it is a very distinct disadvantage to be a Lady Author—anybody who says it isn’t, is foolish. Virginia Woolf makes a pretty fair statement of the disadvantages.” Clearly, Cather had read A Room of One’s Own, a key statement by a feminist modernist, and “pretty fair statement” has been tagged as a reference to that work  Her sarcastic references to feminist reform and to reform more generally suggest, however, that she was more concerned with her gender as a disadvantage for herself rather than with improving the status of women as a class. In 1914, when war was breaking out in Europe, she wrote to Elizabeth Sergeant: “I don’t believe we’ll hear much about suffrage and tea-party legislation for awhile.” In 1920, when she and Edith Lewis were on their way to France, she wrote dismissively to her mother and her sister Elsie about the suffrage supporters on board on their way to a suffrage convention in Geneva, “The suffragettes don’t bother much—some of them are nice and some are dreadful.” Nevertheless, that Cather herself wasn’t a feminist does not preclude our bringing a feminist ethos to the work of editing her letters.

Cather’s relationship to modernism is also vexed. She has been claimed both for antimodernism and for modernism, and the case for her modernism has been articulated both in terms of her approach to culture and to formal experimentation, particularly in The Professor’s House (1925). Certainly, the tagging of names and works in the Complete Letters provides more information about Cather’s connections to modernist authors and her readings of modernist works. In 1934, writing to Mabel Luhan, Cather professed herself to be “delighted with” the great modernist spectacle Four Saints in Three Acts, for which Gertrude Stein wrote the libretto. A late life cranky Cather was more dismissive of Stein, writing in 1947 to E. K. Brown (whom Lewis would authorize as Cather’s biographer after her death) that she had observed “the young Americans who flocked about Gertrude Stein” during a long visit to France, and none of them had subsequently “done anything that took hold very hard.”

As stated above, there is no documentation that Cather ever met Hemingway. Conjecturally, he might have been one of the “young Americans” in Stein’s circle she observed (although that identification is too conjectural for our standards in tagging and annotating the Complete Letters). She did, however, refer to his works in her letters. She told Mabel Luhan in 1932 that she found his Death in the Afternoon “stunning.” Later, sending a copy of Stephen Tennant’s Leaves from a Missionary’s Notebook (1937) to Ferris Greenslet in 1938, she recognized that it would “be rather impossible for an American publisher to handle” Tennant’s book of erotic drawings. She nevertheless agreed with Cyrill Connolly’s review of the British edition, which approved the book’s “lyrical beauty,” but concluded that Americans “want Hemingway and words of four letters, without any perfume.” She seemed rather pleased to beat Hemingway as a candidate for the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, reporting the details of the balloting in 1943 to both her brother Roscoe and to Alfred Knopf.

The case of D. H. Lawrence is complicated. Cather met Lawrence in person in 1923 in New York City through the agency of expatriate painters Earl Brewster and Achsah Barlow-Brewster (Achsah was Edith Lewis’s college roommate) (fig. 4). Later, after Cather and Lewis met up again with D. H. and Frieda Lawrence and Dorothy Brett in New Mexico in 1925, they had Mabel Luhan in common, and both the Brewsters and Luhan published books about their friendships with Lawrence after his early death. The letters themselves, however, provide very little information about these in-person encounters, so unlike in the case of Hemingway, Lawrence has a lengthy biographical annotation. Cather’s one damning published remark on him (quoted in his biographical annotation) appeared in her essay “The Novel Démeuble” written for a forum in the New Republic in 1922 on “The Future of the Novel.” “A novel crowded with physical sensations is no less a catalogue than one crowded with furniture,” she writes. “A book like The Rainbow by Mr. Lawrence, sharply reminds one how vast a distance lies between emotion and mere sensory reactions. Characters can be almost de-humanized by a laboratory study of the behavior of their bodily organs under sensory stimuli—can be reduced, indeed, to mere animal pulp. Can one imagine anything more terrible than the story of Romeo and Juliet, rewritten in prose by Mr. Lawrence?” After she met him, in her letters she focused primarily on the man, the famous author she knew, and never named one of his novels.

Cather liberally sprinkled her extant epistolary prose with the word “modern” but never used the word “modernism,” although she twice used the word “modernistic.” In an early 1931 letter to her twin nieces, she described as “very modernistic” the imported Bohemian ski scarves she had sent them for Christmas, and in 1939, she used the word in a letter about The Professor’s House, but in a way that denies rather than affirms the novel’s aesthetics as modernist. In late 1938 or early 1939, Professor Burges Johnson from Union College in Schenectady wrote Cather seeking permission to quote from a letter she had written to Alfred Knopf, Jr. (“Pat”), who had taken a class on modern fiction with Johnson. The result was one of Cather’s few published statements on her own work and a rare letter she allowed to be published.

In researching proper tagging and annotation for the letter, I discovered that the letter was first excerpted in The Art of Fiction: A Formulation of its Fundamental Principles (1939), co-written and edited by Johnson and Clayton Hamilton, rather than in the October 1940 News Letter of the CEA (the version long known to scholars). In any event, Cather’s explanation to Pat Knopf of the experimental form of the novel, which embeds the first-person “Tom Outland’s Story” in the middle of the third-person account of the thoughts of the titular professor some years after Tom’s death, supports a modernist understanding of the novel’s form. In her letter to Johnson, however, she refuted the perception (perhaps suggested by Johnson in his letter to her) that The Professor’s House was “modernistic.” Arguing that Tom Outland’s story did not fracture the structure because he was “part of the atmosphere of the house,” she located modernism in narrative technique, and particularly stream of consciousness, rather than in form: “If I had happened to write the book in a very modernistic manner, letting everybody's thoughts and memories and shades of feeling tumble into the book helter-skelter, I could have made a rather exciting color study. But the trouble is, these stunts, while they are very exciting, seem to leave nothing behind - no after taste for the writer. They go up, and out, like rockets.” There may be some unknown cache of letters further illuminating Cather’s engagements with modernism, but for now, the letters are suggestive rather than definitive.

Emily

While we have implemented feminist editorial approaches while generating the content of the Complete Letters, we have also worked to employ feminist digital humanities practices in how we manage the collaborations and acknowledge the labor that has gone into the creation of the edition. For that, we have been guided by the seven core principles Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein define in their introduction to Data Feminism and which they use to structure their book: examine power, challenge power, elevate emotion and embodiment, rethink binaries and hierarchies, embrace pluralism, consider context, and make labor visible. We enact the seventh principle in particular by ensuring that all contributors to the Complete Letters and at the Willa Cather Archive have been fairly compensated and visibly and publicly credited for their work. This is evident on both the Credits & Acknowledgments page for the edition and the Staff page for the Cather Archive: everyone including the lead editors, developers and programmers, temporary contributors, and student workers has been credited for their contributions to the project. Further, on our citation guide, we ask that scholars and researchers citing the Complete Letters use the “Willa Cather Archive team” as the name of the editor, rather than simply naming the co-editors or using one name with “et al.” to imply the rest of the editorial team.

In addition to crediting all contributors to the project, we strive to have a feminist approach to collaboration and project management. Although the lead editors are still responsible for certain decisions and I personally perform the final review of all letters before publication, we otherwise work within a less hierarchical framework than is typical for this type of project. Rather than treating the editorial assistants like the implementers of the co-editors’ decisions, for example, everyone working on the project has an equal voice in decision-making and discussions. In fact, we deeply value the input of the development team, the student workers, and other collaborators at and outside UNL to make the Complete Letters as accessible, user-friendly, and effective as possible. We encourage everyone to take ownership of this project together, with our graduate and undergraduate editorial assistants presenting their work on this project at conferences, discussing their experiences on podcasts, and citing their individual contributions in research projects and job applications. We hope the Complete Letters, and the WCA generally, can be a model for feminist digital humanities methods as much as it has become one for digital scholarly editing projects and for digital publication of a single author’s letters.