Willa Cather Short Story Project Response Post

If you haven’t yet read “The Joy of Nelly Deane,” you can read it for free on the Willa Cather Archive: https://cather.unl.edu/writings/shortfiction/ss014

“The Joy of Nelly Deane” starts out as a story about the friendship between two girls, Nelly and Peggy. Nelly is beautiful and full of life, always singing or laughing. Everyone is drawn to her. Peggy is more reserved. Nelly’s first mistake is keeping a secret from her parents that she is engaged to a traveling salesman. She shows Peggy his diamond ring on a necklace that she wears under her clothes.

When Nelly’s father falls on financial hard times, the salesman reroutes and marries the daughter of a wealthy man and Nelly ends up marrying the boring guy, “sullen Scott.” He’s a hard worker, prosperous, but tight fisted, domineering, and a bit ill-groomed. He also alienates people, which inadvertently leads to his wife’s death.

Yes, Nelly dies. Peggy is left to tell the tale. The two drifted apart but Peggy returns to town years later after being away in Rome. Like the narrator in last month’s story, “On the Gulls’ Road,” the narrator tells the tale of a beloved dead woman.

Sheryl Meyering points out that “The Joy of Nelly Deane” is the first story that Cather wrote after Sarah Orne Jewett’s death. If you recall last month’s story, Jewett had suggested to Cather that she drop the masquerade of the male narrator loving a female subject, saying that a woman can love a woman just as well.

Cather has dropped the male masquerade in “The Joy of Nelly Deane,” but the story seems detached. It might be because there is a lot more going on in it than in “On the Gulls’ Road.” Or perhaps Cather was hesitant to put too much passion in a story about two women. But this story is about more than just the two women. There are more characters, and strange characters, too. The three older women, Mrs. Dow, Mrs. Freeze, and Mrs. Spinny, flutter around Nelly. One interpretation is that they are a sinister force, pushing Nelly to embrace feminine conventions that lead to her death (Meyering 129).

A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Willa Cather

Willa Cather’s 150th birthday was December 7th. I worked that evening but “celebrated” by taking a break and going into the library’s stacks to browse the Cather holdings. I was surprised to find a copy of A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Willa Cather (1994) by Sheryl L. Meyering.

It felt like a Birthday Miracle!

If I ever knew about this book, I must not have had access to it when I first started the Willa Cather Short Story Project back in 2019.

Here we are nearing the end of the project and I am somewhat happy I did not have this book to consult over the years. Don’t get me wrong, it is an excellent resource. I simply prefer to come to a story for the first time without too much information. It is fun to make connections between stories by one’s self. Consulting this guide after reading a story is the way to go. Also, if you check it out, beware: there are spoilers of other stories and novels in Meyering’s discussion.

Each short story has its own chapter broken into the following sections:

• Publication History
• Circumstances of Composition, Sources, and Influences
• Relationship to Other Cather Works
• Interpretations and Criticisms
• Works Cited

There is one story that we’ve read for the WCSSP that is not in the book, “Wee Winkie’s Wanderings.”

And I discovered in this book two stories that I did not have on the WCSSP list! One of the stories, “Double Birthday,” I had never heard of. The other, “Uncle Valentine,” I have heard of but have not yet read. It is the title story of a posthumous collection of stories published in 1973 and edited by Bernice Slote, Uncle Valentine and Other Stories: Willa Cather’s Uncollected Short Fiction, 1915-1929. I have a copy on my desk as I type this. Not sure how I missed those two stories. We’ll be reading both “Double Birthday” and “Uncle Valentine” in 2024.

But for now, what did you think about “The Joy of Nelly Deane”? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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New to this blog? Learn more about the Willa Cather Short Story Project here. In a nutshell, we read one Cather short story a month. I remind everyone of what story we’re reading on the second Wednesday of the month and then share a response on the fourth Wednesday of the month. Jump in anytime!