My Mortal Enemy Read online

  “And as an hare whom horns and hounds pursue,

  Pants for the place from which at first she flew”

  It is really like that. I do feel like such an rabbit most of the time. I dont mean that I get panic-stricken. I believe I am still called “executive” at the office. But inside I feel like that. Isn’t there a new disease, beloved by psychologists, called “split personality”?

  Of all these things and many others I long to talk to you. In lieu of so doing I have been reading again this evening [Jewett’s story] “Martha’s Lady.” I do think it is almost the saddest and loveliest of stories. It humbles and desolates me every time I read it—and somehow makes me willing to begin all over and try to be good; like a whipping used to do when I was little. Perhaps after Christmas I can slip up to Boston for a day. Until then a world of love to you and all the well wishes of this season, an hundred fold warmer and more heartfelt than they are wont to be. I shall think of you and of Mrs. Fields often on Christmas Day.

  Devotedly

  Willa

  [written in the top margin of the last page:] As I pick up the sheets of this letter I am horrified—but I claim indulgence because I have left wide margins.

  * See the full letter from Virginia Cather Brockway to Meta Schaper Cather on page 676.

  † Elizabeth Sergeant, Willa Cather: A Memoir (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992), 275.

  * See page 588.

  † Willa Cather, will dated April 29, 1943, Paragraph Seventh.

  ‡ Norman Holmes Pearson, “The Problem of Literary Executorship,” Studies in Bibliography 5 (1952–53), 8.

  * See page 190.

  * See page 413.

  † “Willa Cather Talks of Work,” in Willa Cather in Person, ed. L. Brent Bohlke (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 10.

  * Willa Cather, “My First Novels (There Were Two),” in Willa Cather on Writing (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 93.

  * ?See page 517.

  † See page 561.

  ‡ See page 225.

  * See page 647.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Willa Cather was born near Winchester, Virginia, in 1873. When she was ten years old, her family moved to the prairies of Nebraska, later the setting for a number of her novels. At the age of twenty-one she graduated from the University of Nebraska and spent the next few years doing newspaper work and teaching high school in Pittsburgh. In 1903 her first book, April Twilights, a collection of poems, was published, and two years later The Troll Garden, a collection of stories, appeared in print. After the publication of her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge, in 1912, Cather devoted herself fulltime to writing, and, over the years, completed eleven more novels (including O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, The Professor’s House, and Death Comes for the Archbishop), four collections of short stories, and two volumes of essays. Cather won the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours in 1923. She died in 1947.