Willa Cather Editing Sarah Orne Jewett

“In reading over a package of letters from Sarah Orne Jewett,” Willa Cather wrote in her preface to the Mayflower Edition of The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett (1925), “I find this observation: ‘The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself down rightly on paper—whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.”¹ Cather’s private letters and her public statements in the form of essays, interviews, and speeches testify abundantly that Jewett had teased Cather’s mind over and over in the years following her friend and mentor’s death in 1909. Furthermore, as Cather critics and biographers have noted, in editing and writing her preface to Best Stories, Cather staked a place both for Jewett and herself in literary history.² In the rousing final paragraph of her preface Cather classes Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn as one of “three American books which have the possibility of a long, long life.” Turning to Firs in particular, she continues, “I like to think with what pleasure, with what a sense of rich discovery, the young student of American literature in far distant years to come will take up this book and say, ‘A masterpiece!’”³ Critics have also noted interesting resonances between Cather’s editorial work and preface and her creative work occurring around the same time, especially her novel The Professor’s House (1925), which features the titular Godfrey St. Peter editing the journals of his dead friend, Tom Outland.⁴

Cather has also been assigned responsibility for the form in which Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs appeared as part of Best Stories—with Cather’s preface, Firs constituted volume one of the two volume set, the second volume encompassing eleven short stories. After the initial publication of Firs as a book, Jewett wrote four more stories featuring the same Dunnet Landing setting and characters, but she never incorporated them into Firs before her death. In the 1925 collection, two Dunnet Landing tales Jewett published during her lifetime (“The Queen’s Twin” and “A Dunnet Shepherdess”) and one left in manuscript at her death and published a year later (“William’s Wedding”) are interpolated into Firs.

Cather biographers and critics, who have made Cather’s desire to control the form in which her own works appeared before the public central to our understanding of her career,⁵ give Cather entire credit for the interpolation and blame her for bad judgment. Thus biographer James Woodress expresses “surprise” that “a writer so sensitive to the integrity of a work of art . . . apparently never thought of the 1896 edition of The Country of the Pointed Firs as an autonomous entity” and thus incorporated the three stories in a way that “does violence to the unity of the original work.”⁶ Ann Romines suggests that because Cather felt that she “herself [was] the discerning creator” of Firs as masterpiece, she felt no compunction about “commit[ting] what most Jewett readers consider the most egregious error of her edition, fracturing the formal unity” of the 1896 Firs through “an editorial judgment that seems to violate the ethic of sympathy that she describes as central to Jewett’s art.”⁷ Finally, Marilee Lindemann describes Cather as using “her editorial power” to “violat[e] the integrity of the maternal text she was promoting as a masterpiece of style and structure” resulting in a new version of Firs that followed “the narrative logic of the heterosexual love plot that Jewett’s text had assiduously avoided”⁸ (“A Dunnet Shepherdess” and “William’s Wedding” together introduce the extended courtship and long-delayed marriage of Esther Hight and William Todd—although William appears in the 1896 Firs, nothing intimates that the elderly bachelor fisherman who lives with his mother has a romantic life and marriage prospects).

Certainly, Best Stories was consequential for Jewett’s twentieth century reputation. With Cather’s preface, it was long kept in print and in 1954 Doubleday transformed it into a single-volume...