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Approximately 83 letters from Blanche Mathias to her friend, Jeffers scholar and critic Marlan Beilke covering roughly the period of 1978- to 1982. She died in 1983. Also included are approximately 20 letters and cards from Fr. William Monihan of the University of San Francisco’s Gleeson Library to Beilke, and cards and letters from Blanche Mathias to the Beilke children. The Monihan letters are concerned with Jeffers issues, Beilke’s speaking engagements on Jeffers, the Phoebe Barkan Jeffers Collection gift to the library and letterpress printing projects Beilke was commissioned to do. 

The letters from Mathias almost all concern some faction of Robinson Jeffers, as that is what brought the two together and created this close friendship.  Most of the letters are typewritten, as dictated to her secretary and of course signed by Mathias, and many are multiple pages in single space form, with a scattering of handwritten letters as well. All but a few have their original mailing envelopes. Much of the content concerns the Jeffers Festivals held at Tor House, Blanche’s rememberances of Una and Robin, discussions of other Jeffer’s scholars  like Brophy, Hans and Phoebe Barkan etc and their work, and of course Marlan’s own book Shining Clarity: God and Man in the Works of Robinson Jeffers, 1977.
Blanche Mathias (1887-1983) was a close friend of the Jeffers family, especially so of Una Jeffers, and spent much time in Carmel and San Francisco visiting, and at social dinners, entertaining the Jeffers in NYC etc. Mathias wrote of her Recollections & Memoirs of the Jeffers, in a manuscript that was previously sold in these rooms and remains unpublished. A very literate woman, Blanche was  friends with many ,literary personalities of the 20’s and 30’s including Georgia O’Keefe, Bennett Cerf, John Steinbeck, Edna St Vincent Millay and others. In the 1920’s Mathias served as an art critic for the Chicago Herald and Evening Post, and her poetry was published in the literary magazines of the era. Her  papers, scrapbooks, letters and archive were donated to the Yale Collection of American Literature at theBeinecke Library between 1967 and 1984. Much of her correspondence with Una Jeffers  was published in a series of 4 issues of the Robinson Jeffers Newsletter in 1978-79 covering the period 1927-1950. She lived an elegant life style on Nob Hill in San Francisco, travelled widely, and contributed to may philanthropic causes.