Sapphira and the Slave Girl, and: Youth and the Bright Medusa (review)

In the decades since Susan Rosowski, James Woodress, and Sharon O'Brien ushered in the second wave of Cather scholarship in the mid-1980s, Willa Cather has been hailed for her sophisticated portraits of rural life in the American Midwest and Southwest. However, two new editions of Cather's works, recently published by the University of Nebraska Press, may challenge the popular perception of Cather as a "western" writer. These texts, the ninth and tenth volumes in the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition series, are Cather's final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, originally published in 1940, and Youth and the Bright Medusa, a collection of eight short stories published over seventeen years, revised by Cather and reissued as her first Alfred A. Knopf title in 1920. Unlike the prairie and high desert landscapes associated with Cather's most celebrated novels, the predominant geography of these two volumes is east of the Mississippi. For Sapphira and the Slave Girl, Cather fictively returns to her ancestral home in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. With the exception of "A Wagner Matinée," "The Sculptor's Funeral," and "'A Death in the Desert,'" Cather explicitly links the stories in Youth and the Bright Medusa to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, or to America's cultural capital, New York—cities where she made her name as an editor for Home Monthly and McClure's magazines.

As with other titles in the series, these books are designed to serve the needs of Cather scholars while respecting the author's "explicitly stated intentions for her works," preferences which are well documented in her surviving correspondence, manuscripts, typescripts, and page proofs (Sapphira and the Slave Girl viii–ix). Cather played an active role in the publication of her fiction, perhaps owing to her own experience as an editor. In addition to the "close textual attention" she paid to her own writing at each stage of composition, she scrutinized the design of her books, recommending or rejecting typeface, paper stock, and margin width (ix). Thus, the editors heed her insistence on an ample margin, a weighty typeface, and a cream-colored paper stock while also accounting for contemporary printing techniques. In so doing, they seek to provide the most authoritative text possible.

Each volume conforms to Cather's expressed preferences for formatting her works and documents those preferences and textual changes in a thorough Textual Apparatus produced by Frederick M. Link, Charles W. Mignon, and Kari A. Ronning. (Judith Boss joins them on Youth and the Bright Medusa.) The apparatus in each book comprises a textual essay, emendations, notes on emendations, a table of rejected substantives, and word division lists. (Sapphira and the Slave Girl includes an additional section, appendixes to the textual essay, containing textual fragments cut or altered from the copy-text used for the Cather Edition.) The textual editing team scrupulously details the complicated publication history and evolution of each of these two works, tracing the nearly two decades involved in the composition, revision, and publication of the stories included in Youth and the Bright Medusa and the fourteen extant prepublication texts for Sapphira and the Slave Girl. The textual essays also justify editorial decisions made for the current editions with regard to the lists of emendations and rejected variants. Moreover, they explain the rationale for editorial choices involving copy-texts and emendations, listing five reasons for emending Youth and the Bright Medusa and four reasons for emending Sapphira and the Slave Girl (495, 577). With the exception of correcting simple factual mistakes in Youth and the Bright Medusa, neither book emends in order to...