Story of the Week: The Joy of Nelly Deane

Willa Cather (1873–1947)
From Willa Cather: Stories, Poems, & Other Writings

Interesting Links

“Explore the World of Willa Cather in Her Nebraska Hometown” (Jeff MacGregor, Smithsonian Magazine)

“At Last, Literary Pioneer Willa Cather Is Having a Moment” (Maureen Corrigan, The Washington Post)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Bookkeeper’s Wife,” Willa Cather
• “An Autumn Holiday,” Sarah Orne Jewett
• “A Problem,” Henry James
• “A Visit to Avoyelles,” Kate Chopin

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“I’m engaged, Peggy.” Illustration by Paul Julien Meylan (1882–1962) to accompany “The Joy of Nelly Deane” in the October 1911 issue of The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine. Half-tone plate engraved for the magazine by Charles Wesley Chadwick (1861–1940). Image courtesy of the Willa Cather Archive.

“I expect I shall have to go to London again in the spring, but I am hoping to get home next summer, and to run out for a little visit with you,” Willa Cather wrote from New York to her Aunt Franc in Bladen, Nebraska, at the beginning of 1910. “The one this summer was such a satisfactory visit. It was the first time I’ve really seen you for years. . . . There is no place in the world where I can be so happy or rest so well.” As it happened, Cather wouldn’t make it to London that year, and she didn’t return to Nebraska until the summer of 1912. In the meantime, she published a story, “The Joy of Nelly Deane,” that perhaps not coincidentally features a narrator returning from Europe to visit the western prairie town of Riverbend, “the only place that had ever really been home to me.”

Cather had spent the previous fifteen years writing stories for national magazines, but she had doubts about her own talent and had become dissatisfied with her fiction. “I wanted to write after the best style of Henry James—the foremost mind that ever applied itself to literature in America,” she told an interviewer in 1921. “I was dazzled. I was trying to work in a sophisticated medium and write about highly developed people whom I knew only superficially. . . . I had been trying to sing a song that did not lie in my voice.”

After Cather began working at McClure’s in 1906, she found herself overwhelmed with editorial responsibilities, and during her early years at the magazine she wrote and published a handful of soon-forgotten stories. “She still was playing the sedulous ape to Henry James in matters of style and technique, character, subject matter, and theme,” confirms Cather biographer James Woodress. Then, in March 1908, she met Annie Fields and her companion, Sarah Orne Jewett, the renowned author of the story cycles Deephaven and The Country of the Pointed Firs. She visited the couple several times over the next few months, and Cather and Jewett corresponded during the following year. Three of Cather’s letters to Jewett have survived and the manuscripts are located among Jewett’s papers at Harvard. None of Jewett’s original letters to Cather are extant, however; we have only the edited (and probably abridged) texts of three of them because Fields published a selection of Jewett’s letters in 1911, two years after her death at the age of 59.

“The first three stories Cather wrote after meeting Jewett show the immediate impact of Jewett’s influence,” writes Sharon O’Brien, the editor of Library of America’s Willa Cather volumes. “Evidently, Cather’s receptivity to her mentor’s literary example grew along with their developing friendship.” Cather published the first story, “On the Gull’s Road,” in the pages of McClure’s soon after her stay in Boston. The narrator, an ambassador, recalls twenty years earlier when, returning from a diplomatic post in Genoa to New York, he fell in love with a fellow passenger, a dying woman in a loveless marriage to the ship’s engineer. Anticipating that Jewett wouldn’t care for the story, Cather appears not to have sent it to her; “I am afraid you won’t like it, dear Lady. The scent of the tube-rose seems to cling to it still,” Cather wrote in late October 1908, referring to the story’s romantic flourishes.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, one couldn’t hide a story in the pages of a magazine as popular as McClure’s, and Jewett soon came across “On the Gull’s Road” when she received her copy of the December issue. “With what deep happiness and recognition I have read the ‘McClure’ story,—night before last I found it with surprise and delight,” she wrote to Cather soon after the story appeared. “You have drawn your two figures of the wife and her husband with unerring touches and wonderful tenderness for her.” Yet Jewett gently if pointedly criticized Cather’s choice of narrator: “The lover is as well done as he could be when a woman writes in the man’s character,—it must always, I believe, be something of a masquerade. I think it is safer to write about him as you did about the others, and not try to be he! And you could almost have done it as yourself—a woman could love her in that same protecting way—a woman could even care enough to wish to take her away from such a life, by some means or other.” In a subsequent letter, Jewett expanded upon her remarks, and she urged Cather to leave the magazine and “find a quiet place” to focus on her writing; “your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your audience.”

Jewett had told Cather that virtually all the background for her own stories derived from her childhood memories of South Berwick, Maine, so Cather had assumed she was more likely to enjoy her next story. Along with the letter that made light of “Gulls’ Road,” Cather enclosed a draft of “The Enchanted Bluff,” a sketch about six Nebraskan boys on a camping trip. After one of the boys relates the legend of the lost tribe of the Enchanted Mesa, they all imagine visiting the storied butte in New Mexico as soon as they are free to do so as adults. “I somehow think [it] might interest you a little—because it is different from the things you knew when you were a child,” Cather wrote to Jewett. “I make bold to send this scorned tale (Mr. McClure says it is all introduction) and I pray you cast your eye upon it in some empty half hour. It is about a place a weary long way from South Berwick.” Although her employer, S. S. McClure, rejected it for the magazine, the editor of Harper’s accepted it only weeks later and it appeared in the April 1909 issue.

We do not know if Jewett read the story or otherwise responded before she suffered a debilitating stroke in March; she died in June. During this period, Cather finished a third story, which was accepted by Century magazine that summer, and it would seem she had written it with her mentor very much in mind. “The Joy of Nelly Deane” notably features a first-person female narrator—something of a rarity in Cather’s oeuvre. In several ways, O’Brien points out, the story “shows the impact of Jewett’s legacy: not only does Cather dispense with her Jamesian voice in returning to Nebraska subject matter, but she also envisions creative power as female; the story’s heroine Nelly is a gifted singer. Jewett’s harmonious uniting of ‘woman’ and ‘writer’ in her life and work had helped Cather to integrate these seemingly opposed identities, and this reconciliation gave her new confidence and direction as a writer.”

Two years later, in May 1911, Cather visited Fields in Boston and spent a week surrounded by Jewett’s books and possessions. The following month she stayed with Jewett’s sister, Mary, at the family residence in Maine, where she sat at her mentor’s old desk and wrote letters to friends. Cather had not written a single work of fiction since Jewett’s death, but she had just quit her full-time job at McClure’s and would soon begin work on her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge. "I often recall what Sarah Orne Jewett said to me many years ago,” Cather later told a reporter in Nebraska. "Miss Jewett said a knowledge of the world was needed in order to understand the parish. When in big cities or other lands, I have sometimes found types and conditions which particularly interested me, and then after returning to Nebraska, discovered the same types right at home, only I had not recognized their special value until seen thru another environment.”

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In late August 1910, after The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine had accepted the story for publication, Cather wrote to the editor, Robert Underwood Johnson: “Would you be kind enough to change the title of the story which I recently shortened for you? The story never really had a name, and I think it was called ‘Nellie Deane,’ or ‘The Story of Nellie Dean’ provisionally. I think ‘The Flower in the Grass’ would be a good title for it. That is really the idea of the story; a beautiful girl hidden away in the prairie country where nobody ever saw her.” It is not known if there was a subsequent exchange about the story’s title; it appeared more than a year later, in the October 1911 issue, as “The Joy of Nelly Deane.”

Notes: The town’s performance of “Queen Esther” is of the early eighteenth-century oratorio by George Frederick Handel, Esther. “There is a Green Hill Far Away” is a hymn written in 1848 by Anglo-Irish poet Cecil Frances Alexander and sung to tunes by various composers. First published in 1874, “The Ninety and Nine” is a hymn by American gospel singer Ira Sankey, adapted from the poem “The Lost Sheep” (1868) by Scottish lyricist Elizabeth Clephane, based on the parable told in Matthew 18:10–14. Commonly known as “Washed in the Blood of the Lamb,” “Are You Washed in the Blood?” was published in 1878 by Presbyterian minister Elisha Hoffman. The translated quote about the merchants of Caesar is from Book I of Julius Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War. Cather’s narrator, Margaret, compares the relationship between Nelly Deane and Scott Spinny to Jean de La Fontaine’s fable “The Grasshopper and the Ant,” in which the grasshopper spends the summer singing while the toiling ant piles up supplies for winter. Isinglass is a thin, transparent sheet of mica, or muscovite, commonly used for the side panels of wood stoves in the 1800s.

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Nell and I were almost ready to go on for the last act of "Queen Esther," and we had for the moment got rid of our three patient dressers, Mrs. Dow, Mrs. Freeze, and Mrs. Spinny. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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Sunday, December 1, 2024

The Joy of Nelly Deane