This month’s story for the Willa Cather Short Story Project is “The Bookkeeper’s Wife.” It was published in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine in May 1916.

You can read “The Bookkeeper’s Wife” and see the accompanying original illustrations by Arthur William Brown on the Willa Cather Archive: https://cather.unl.edu/writings/shortfiction/ss047

The Library of America featured “The Bookkeeper’s Wife” as a story of the week in April 2023. They shared some background about Cather’s plans for this story:

In 1917, Willa Cather was working on a new book, a story collection called “Office Wives.”

She had already made arrangements to publish the stories in a magazine as she wrote them and to issue the series as a book when all the stories had been finished—but the book never appeared. In fact, there ended up being only four stories: three were published in magazines and one manuscript has vanished. She put the series aside to finish work on her next novel, My Ántonia, and she never revisited the project.

Read more on the LOA website.

We’ll read Cather’s other two office stories, “Ardessa” and “Her Boss” in May and June.

What’s next?

Read “The Bookkeeper’s Wife” sometime this month, then come back to discuss it in the response post I’ll share on April 24th. Or, feel free to read it now and comment here if you can’t wait until then!

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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 what story we’re reading on the second Wednesday of the month and then share a response on the fourth Wednesday. Jump in anytime!