Letters From Honeyhill: A Woman’s View of Homesteading, 1914–1931 by Cecelia Hennel Hendricks (review)

Reviews 183 Willa Cather: A Pictorial Memoir. Photographs by Lucia Woods and others, text by Bernice Slote. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. 134 pages, $27.95.) Willa Cather: A Pictorial Memoir (published in 1972 and since 1980 available only at rare book prices) has been reissued by the University of Nebraska Press (1986). It consists of two parts, the first devoted to Willa Cather and providing biographical photographs and text; the second devoted to Willa Cather’sAmerica, providing photographs depicting the places Cather wrote about, with accompanying quotations from her texts. While the book deserves notice because it presents materials introducing Cather’s life and art, it has also been hailed as “a perfect book of its kind,” receiving three national awards for excellence because of what is done with those materials—for its fidelity to principles basic to Cather’s art. In her essay, “Light on Adobe Walls,” Cather wrote that an artist cannot paint sunlight, or “even relations of light and shade—he can only paint some emotion they give him, some man-made arrangement of them that happens to give him personal delight . . . .” It is a principle that Bernice Slote and Lucia Woods honored in Willa Cather: A Pictorial Memoir by rejecting attempts at literal translations in favor of offering their “re-productions” (the word is Cather’s). As a result, by drawing upon a lifetime’s study, Bernice Slote in her text provides her encounter with Cather’s art, a microcosm of all readers’experience of it. Similarly, photographs by Woods and others provide not attempts to transcribe the fiction literally, but a photographer’sexpression in her own medium of emotions evoked by Cather’s fiction. “Bone Gulley,” for example, is faithful to the emotion in O Pioneers! of the land as a wild thing that had its own moods; and “Quebec Seminary” conveys a senseof quiet security that is true to the pleasure one feels in reading Shadows on the Rock. This is, then, a book about the union of life and art in an interplay of voices—those of persons from Cather’s life and of characters from her fiction, joined by those of an eminent Cather scholar and, speaking through her photographs, a distinguished photographer. Willa Cather:A Pictorial Memoir is both an introduction to Cather’s art and art in its own right, and its reissue iswelcome indeed. SUSAN J. ROSOWSKI University of Nebraska, Lincoln Letters From Honeyhill: A Woman’s View of Homesteading, 1914-1931. By Cecelia Hennel Hendricks. (Boulder, Colorado: A Bristlecone Book/Pruitt Publishing, 1986. 704 pages, $22.95.) In 1914, Cecilia Hennel left her teaching career at the University of Indiana to marry John Hendricks, who had taken up a homestead in the Shoshone Valley in northwestern Wyoming to raise clover and honey bees. 184 Western American Literature Together they built up the successful Honeyhill Farm. Friends said Cecilia was wasting her education to become a farmer’s wife. She answered them saying, “They were wrong. I needed that education and I used it every day of my life!” Her letters to her family form a detailed document of life on the Wyoming frontier, dealing with food production and preservation, with sick­ ness, death, birth and failed dreams. They depict women’s efforts to bring beauty, grace and comfort into their homes and community. “I’ll be a writer someday,” Cecilia said. These letters were written with the intention that they be preserved in lieu of a journal. Cecilia wrote in a straightforward and objective manner. Except for a few love letters and poems, she wrote obliquely about herself in order to camouflage her feelings, and to detach herself from intimacy. Her autobiographical intention was pow­ ered by the motive to convince readers of her self-worth and to authenticate her self-image as she learned to cope. Thus Cecilia’sletters are autobiography, as defined by Estelle Jelinek in her study of the genre, Women’s Autobiog­ raphy. Though this narrative is comprised of selective letters, reading becomes tedious because the correspondents remain names rather than becoming char­ acters. The letters lack both introspection and romanticizing of events. There­ fore, their greatest value is their detailed record...