The Song of the Lark

Textual Essay

813 Textual Essay This twelfth volume of the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition presents a critical text of Cather’s third novel, The Song of the Lark, published by Houghton Mifflin on 2 October 1915. A British edition was published by the John Murray Company in 1916, and another version, with a preface, was printed by Jonathan Cape in 1932. A second edition, with many cuts and revisions, appeared as volume two of the Autograph Edition, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1937. This edition was the basis for a British edition published by Cassell in 1938. No other editions in English were published during Cather’s lifetime; no manuscripts, proofs, or other materials antedating or contemporary with these editions are known to survive. We have chosen as copy-text a copy of the first trade printing of the Houghton Mifflin first edition because it most closely realizes Cather’s intention for her novel at the time of her most intense imaginative engagement with the work. The policy of the Cather Edition is to present a work as Cather intended it at the time of its first publication in book form, admitting as emendations only those changes authorized by Cather or deemed necessary by the present editors.∞ We do not emend the text to include later revisions by Cather that alter the substance of the work or its aesthetic intention, or that may represent her acquiescence in a later set of conventions textual essay 814 governing accidentals or typography. Such variants, when substantive or quasi-substantive and in authorial texts, are included in the List of Rejected Substantives.≤ In addition to preserving the full record of all variants in the Editorial Office of the Cather Edition (Cather Project, Department of English, University of Nebraska– Lincoln), we discuss the accidental variants in this essay. Our editorial procedure is guided by the protocols of the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Scholarly Editions. We begin with a bibliographical survey of the history of the text, identifying any problems it presents. Making a calendar of extant texts, we collect and examine examples of all known texts produced during Cather’s lifetime, identifying those forms that may be authorial (i.e., that involved or might have involved Cather’s participation or intervention ).≥ These forms are then collated against a base text serving as a standard of collation. The collations provide lists of substantive and accidental variants among these forms. A conflation constructed from the collations produces a list of all substantive and accidental changes in all relevant (authorial) editions.∂ After an analysis of this conflation we choose a copy-text and prepare a critical text (an emended copy-text). The collations and the conflation also furnish the materials for an emendations list that identifies changes the editors have made in the copy-text, and a table of rejected substantives that contributes to a history of the text as contained in its various authorial forms. In a separate procedure we make a list of end-hyphenated compounds with their proper resolution.∑ This essay includes discussions of the composition of The Song of the Lark and of the production and printing history of the text during Cather’s lifetime; an analysis of the changes made in the text during this period; a rationale for the choice of the copy-text of this edition; and a statement of the policy under which emendations have been introduced. All page and line numbers are to the text of the present edition, unless otherwise noted. textual essay 815 Composition The roots of the story in the lives of Cather and Olive Fremstad are discussed in detail in the Historical Essay. Although Cather apparently conceived the idea of a story about an opera singer early in 1912—she mentioned it in a letter to Elizabeth Sergeant (1 March 1912)—other projects came first, notably the writing and publication of O Pioneers! (1913), S. S. McClure’s autobiography (1914), and the article about opera singers that introduced her to Olive Fremstad. The process of writing the new novel probably began in the summer of 1913, when Cather mentioned a character she was then calling Kronstall (Cather to Sergeant, 4 July [1913]). Later that fall, after a visit to her family’s old home in Virginia, she reported that she was working hard, presumably on The Song of the Lark, while visiting Isabelle McClung in...