I'm sure, if you're familiar with the works of Willa Cather, this is an excellent collection. But I'm not, so it isn't. Some parts are nice, but a lot of this delves into personal feelings of people Miss Cather knew, and to read a complete stranger's personal correspondence is surprisingly not voyeuristic, but uninteresting.

Miss Cather does have quite a few thoughts of greatness:

- How can I "do anything" here? I have'nt seen enough of the world or anything else.
- The physical person of you, the almost family tie between us, the old wish for well-being, hold perfectly staunch. The spirit of you eludes me. Perhaps it is because our lives are so different.
- Such a ravishing world and such a short life to see it in.
- "your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your audience, you must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world that holds offices, in all society, all Bohemia, the city, the country—in short, you must write to the human heart, the great consciousness that all humanity goes to makeup. Otherwise what might be strength in a writer, and what might be insight is only observation; sentiment falls into sentimentality—you can write about life, but never write life itself. And to write and work on this level, we must live on it–we must at least recognize it and defer to it every step. We must be ourselves, but our best selves."
- "....I want to go right back into that canyon and be mauled about my its big brutality, though all my bruises are not gone yet. It's a country that drives you crazy with delight, and that's all there is to it. I can't say anything more intelligent about it.
- I suppose the test of one's decency is how much of a fight one can put up after one has stopped caring, and after one has found that one can never please the people they wanted to please.
- my first impulse is to think that my own way of seeing things is the right way. But my second thought is always to admit that this is wrong and that I have been often mistaken.
- Some of me was buried with him in France, and some of him was left alive in me.
- We are like that about the people we love best sometimes, we have a kind of loving jealousy about them.
- There is no God in California, no real life.
- It seems to me that the pleasure one feels in a work art is just one thing that one does not have to explain.
- Our great enlightenments always come in flashes.
- What can money buy that is so worth while as every as beautiful country and the pleasant things of every-day life which so often go with beautiful country?
- There are few things in one's life so precious as to have been given that magical kind of perception and sympathy towards someone we love. ( )

I have always loved Willa Cather's work, so I really enjoyed this collection. It took me forever to read, but I loved immersing myself in her time period and her perspective. I feel a little bad about reading letters that she so adamantly refused to want published, but she remains a fascinating woman. ( )

I read a lot of literary correspondence, and I have a large collection of letter editions (much unread) on my shelves. I think I really got interested in other people's letters when I was in grad school doing work on Willa Cather. In an article about the letters written for the Willa Cather Newsletter and Review, Andrew Jewell writes: "For many Willa Cather scholars, there are certain missing manuscripts that haunt the mind. . . ." Jewell captures perfectly the feeling I have about these letters--I've been haunted by them since I started studying Cather 20 or so years ago. To think that they can finally be quoted from--and we can throw out those nasty paraphrases!!--is nothing less than a revolution in Cather scholarship.

The provision of Cather's will stated that her letters couldn't be published or quoted from. She had a nephew who lived into his 90s who very strictly adhered to Cather's wishes. The Cather scholars at the U of Nebraska, led by Susan Rosowski, had a very good relationship with Charles Cather, and they were respectful of his intention to honor Cather's wishes about the letters. When Charles Cather died in about 2008, he made a gift to the University of a collection of manuscripts, letters, and other artifacts from Cather's working life the likes of which will literally change the landscape of future Cather scholarship.

It's not my purpose here to argue whether the letters should or shouldn't be published. I believe the Cather Foundation has done the right thing by publishing them, and I also believe that Janice Stout and Andrew Jewell, the book's editors, were the right people to put out this first book. I would also predict that in the not-so-distant future we will see a book of Cather Family Letters edited by someone in the Cather family.

Stout and Jewell did a good job with this book. Choosing what to include and what to leave out--only about 10% of the existing collection appears in the book--must have been a difficult task, and I think they've done an admirable job. My one quibble with the book, and it's a pretty big one, is that the editorial notes to guide the reader through these letters are extremely limited. This was obviously an editorial choice, and I don't know their thinking behind the minimalist approach. For the general reader, I imagine the lack of notes will feel like a curious omission--or a frustrating lack.

In my head, this book ought to get 4 stars, but from my heart I'm giving it 5 stars. ( )