Cather, Elsie Margaret (1890-1964) (“Bobbie”). Cather’s sister. Born in Red Cloud, NE, shortly before Willa Cather graduated from high school, Elsie attended the University of Nebraska in Lincoln from 1908 to 1910, before transferring to Smith College, in Northampton, MA, from which she graduated with an A.B. in English and Latin in 1912. She undertook graduate study at the University of Nebraska in 1914 and in 1916 received her A.M. with a major in philosophy and a minor in English. At both the undergraduate and the graduate level at Nebraska, she studied under Louise Pound. She began a career in high school teaching in 1912, when she took a position in Lander, WY, where her brother Roscoe then lived with his family. She also taught in Albuquerque, NM; Corning, IA; Cleveland, OH; and briefly Red Cloud, when illness in the family brought her home. Her longest tenure as a teacher was at Lincoln (NE) High School, where she began teaching in 1920, with Olivia Pound and Mariel Gere as colleagues. Willa Cather's expectation that Elsie be responsible for aging family and friends and for legal affairs after their parents' deaths sometimes brought the sisters into conflict. Elsie Cather retired from Lincoln High School in 1942. She died in Lincoln.

Wilder, Charlotte (1898-1980). American poet and educator. Born in Madison, WI, Wilder spent her childhood in California and China, where her father was a diplomat. Playwright and novelist Thornton Wilder was her brother. She graduated from Berkeley High School in 1915 and received a BA from Mount Holyoke College (1919) and an MA from Radcliffe College (1925). She taught English at Wheaton College from 1926 to 1928 and Smith College from 1928 to 1933, when her career as a publishing poet began in earnest. She became very close to Cather’s niece Virginia Cather, corresponding with her long after Virginia’s 1933 graduation from Smith. Cather met Wilder during her 1933 visit to Smith. After Wilder resigned from Smith to devote herself to writing, she moved to New York City and was involved in the Federal Writers Project. Her volume of experimental verse Phases of the Moon (1936) provoked a puzzled response from critics. After a nervous breakdown in 1941, she spent most of the rest of her life in mental hospitals.

Lewis, Edith Labaree (1881-1972). Magazine editor, advertising copywriter, and Cather's domestic partner. Born in Lincoln, NE, to Henry Euclid Lewis and Lillie Gould Lewis, Edith Lewis attended the preparatory school associated with the University of Nebraska, earning college credits from the University before transferring to Smith College in Northampton, MA, in 1899. She received an A.B. in English from Smith in 1902 and returned home to teach elementary school. She met Willa Cather in the summer of 1903 at the home of Sarah Harris, publisher of the Lincoln Courier. Moving to New York City soon afterward, Lewis settled into a studio on Washington Square and found work at the Century Publishing Company. Cather was her guest when she visited the city from Pittsburgh. In 1906, at Cather's suggestion, Lewis applied for a position as an editorial proofreader at McClure's Magazine, and the two women worked together on the McClure's staff for six years. In 1908, they moved into a shared apartment at 82 Washington Place, and then, in 1912, to Five Bank Street. Lewis left McClure's in 1915 to become managing editor of Every Week Magazine, where she stayed until the magazine folded in 1918. In 1919 she began a long career as an advertising copywriter at the J. Walter Thompson Co. In 1926 Edith Lewis acquired the land on which she and Cather built their cottage on Grand Manan Island. When they lost their apartment on Bank Street to subway construction in 1927, they shared quarters at the Grosvenor Hotel when they were both in New York City. In 1932 they took an apartment at 570 Park Avenue. Throughout their relationship, Lewis was closely involved in Cather's creative process, reading and editing her work in pre-publication forms. Cather's will appointed Lewis as executor of her literary estate and a beneficiary of her literary trust. Lewis authorized E.K. Brown as Cather's first biographer and published her own memoir of Cather, Willa Cather Living (1953). She remained in their Park Avenue apartment after Cather's death and died there after a long period of illness and invalidism. She is buried at Cather's side in Jaffrey, NH.

Lewis, Mary Delia (1873-1937). American educator, Edith Lewis’s cousin. Born in Madrid, NY, to Arthur George Lewis and Delia C. Loomis Lewis, Mary Lewis spent most of her childhood in Worcester, MA, where her father was a teacher and school principal. She graduated from Smith College in Northampton, MA, in 1894, and taught English, Latin, and Greek in secondary schools and at the Pennsylvania College for Women until she joined the English department at Smith in 1906. From 1908 to 1909 she took a leave of absence to earn her MA from the University of Michigan. She then returned to Smith, remaining on the faculty until her retirement and specializing in the teaching of composition and American literature. Mary Lewis’s father and Edith Lewis’s father, Henry, were brothers. Willa Cather’s sister, Elsie Cather, and nieces Virginia Cather and Mary Virginia Auld, all of whom studied at Smith, evidently became acquainted with Mary Lewis there. She died in Northampton while still an active faculty member.