Willa Cather, a Prolific Writer Wrote Many of Her Famous Novels in Jaffrey

Willa Cather

WILLA CATHER (1873-1947) ~ Born Dec. 7, 1873 near Winchester, VA, Willa Cather’s family moved to Nebraska when she was nine. After graduating from the University of Nebraska, she worked in Pittsburgh for ten years and, in 1906, moved to New York City to be on the staff of McClure’s Magazine.

Cather spent months in Jaffrey , usually in the fall, from 1917 until 1940. She completed My Ántonia here and wrote portions of nine other novels, including the Pulitzer Prize winner, One of Ours. She wrote her brother in November, 1938 from Jaffrey’s Shattuck Inn: “ I am up here alone at this hotel in the woods where I have done most of my best work and where the proprietors are so kind to me.  I finished Ántonia here, finished A Lost Lady and began the Archbishop. The best part of all the better books was written here.”

My Ántonia was written in a tent at High Mowing at 171 Thorndike Pond Road. When Cather put a tent on the land in 1917 to write her novel, it was owned by James Robinson, brother-in-law of Mrs. Benjamin L. Robinson (VIS President 1908 -1928) and then by the Blaines, relatives of Mrs. Wetherell (VIS President 1928-1948). One of Ours, which won her the 1923 Pulitzer Prize, had passages based on Jaffrey’s Dr. Frederick Sweeney's record of a 1918 influenza outbreak aboard a ship during World War I. She and her companion, Edith Lewis, are buried in the southwest corner of the Old Burying Ground.

Willa Cather’s grave is marked with a plain headstone that doesn’t identify her as a writer. It is instead inscribed with a line from My Ántonia, ". . . that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great."

Willa Cather sign from the Melville Academy Museum exhibit.