Other House, The.
From Cather’s Library
[Cather, Willa]. James, Henry. The Other House. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1896.
8vo.; hinges starting; spine cocked and loose but still attached; claret cloth, worn with some light stains; t.e.g.
First American edition of the key 1890s novel by James; 2150 copies, the entire edition: Edel & Laurence A47b. With two pages of advertisements bound-in at rear. From Willa Cather’s library, with her large, early, possibly contemporary ownership signature on the first blank; contemporary newspaper review affixed, presumably by Cather, at the rear.
From the outset, Cather’s fiction was compared—sometimes favorably, sometimes not—to that of Henry James, who was, at the time, an inescapable influence for anyone writing in English. This was especially true for Cather, who shared a nearly obsessive attachment to his chief themes: propriety and fulfillment; active and passive approaches to life; the dangerous power of love; gender roles. The two also shared a belief in America and American-ness as a valid setting for great literature. Though it is unlikely they ever met, Cather later acknowledged the shadow James cast: “All students imitate,” she commented in 1925, “I began by imitating Henry James. He was the most interesting American who was writing at the time, and I strove laboriously to pattern after him” (Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice, by Sharon O’Brien, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 297). Cather admitted she was “dazzled” by the expatriated writer, that “in those days, no one seemed so wonderful as Henry James; for me, he was the perfect writer.” (Cather did connect at one short remove with James through her mentor Sarah Orne Jewett, who both knew James and once visited with him at Lamb House, his country home in Rye.)
Cather described The Other House as “Shakespearean,” as a book that united “great art with great emotions.” James did not always reserve the same enthusiasm for literary efforts: in 1906, a decade after The Other House appeared, James wrote to Witter Bynner: “I have your graceful letter about The Troll Garden [Cather’s first book of short stories]...I brazenly confess that I not only haven’t yet read it, but haven’t even been meaning to... [The] sacred truth is that, being now almost in my 100th year [James was, in fact, only 63], with a long and weary experience of such matters behind me, promiscuous fiction has become abhorrent to me, and I find it the hardest thing in the world to read almost any new novel. Any is hard enough, but the hardest from innocent hands of young females, young American females perhaps above all...” (Henry James Letters, Volume IV, 1895-1916, by Leon Edel, ed., Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 1984, p. 395).
Books from Cather’s library are scarce; this is only the fourth we have encountered and it is, by any standard, the most compelling. From the distinguished Henry James collection of Ronald J. Dzierbicki, Detroit.
Willa (née Wilella) Cather was born to a poor Back Creek, Virginia family in 1873, the oldest of seven children. When she was nine her family moved to Red Cloud, Nebraska, where she encountered the environment and immigrants who would later populate her fictions. An ambitious and independent young woman, Cather attended the University of Nebraska where she majored in Classic Languages. She soon set her sights on a career in journalism, publishing her first work in the college newspaper and moving to Pittsburgh in 1895 to manage and edit the Home Monthly—to which she frequently contributed pseudonymously—and in 1897, as a copy editor, music and theatre critic for the Pittsburgh Daily Leader. In 1901, during a hiatus from periodical work, she taught high school. During this period she met Isabelle McClung, who would be a lifelong friend and patron. McClung invited Cather to live with her, and to travel with her, and provided her a study in which she wrote her first published volumes: April Twilights (1903)
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