Jewett, Sarah Orne (1849-1909). American short story writer and novelist. Born in South Berwick, ME, Jewett began sharing homes in Boston (at 148 Charles Street) and Manchester-on-the-Sea, MA, with Annie Adams Fields in 1881, while continuing to live in her family home in South Berwick with her mother and sister part of the year. She was associated throughout her career with the Atlantic Monthly, and her best-known work, The Country of the Pointed Firs, was serialized there in 1896. Like much of her fiction, it focused on rural and small town New England life. By the time Cather met Jewett at 148 Charles Street in 1908, Jewett had largely ceased writing because of a spinal concussion she suffered in a 1902 carriage accident. She wrote important letters of advice to Cather in 1908, criticizing her decision to write "The Gull's Road" (1908) from the perspective of a male character, which she called "something of a masquerade" (27 Nov. 1908), and urging her to give up her editorial work at McClure's Magazine so she could focus full-time on fiction writing (13 Dec. 1908). After Jewett's death in South Berwick in 1909, Cather often referred to her and her advice about writing. Cather edited The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett (1925) for publisher Houghton Mifflin, and in her preface classed The Country of the Pointed Firs with Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter as one of "three American books which have the possibility of a long, long life."

Ward, Mary Augusta Arnold (1851-1920) (“Mrs. Humphry Ward”). British writer. Born in Tasmania in 1856, Mary and her family left for England, where she was educated at boarding schools. While living in Oxford, England, she met and married Humphry Ward, a tutor and fellow of Brasenose College. She continued to educate herself in languages and contemporary religious issues, which play an important part in her first popular novel, Robert Elsmere (1888). Her many novels often combine serious issues with aristocratic love stories and were very popular in both England and the U.S. Ward, who always published under the name Mrs. Humphry Ward, worked for the betterment of the poor and was a founder and first president of the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League in Great Britain. As editor of McClure’s Magazine, Cather corresponded with Ward about the serialization of Marriage à la Mode (1909). Their correspondence is not extant, but Cather mentions the work in letters to Ward’s friends Sarah Orne Jewett and Annie Adams Fields.

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.

Burlingame, Edward Livermore (1848-1922). American editor. Born in Boston, MA, Edward Burlingame studied at Harvard University until he left to serve as a private secretary to his father, Anson Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln’s appointed minister to China. Burlingame earned a PhD from Heidelberg and honorary degrees from Harvard and Columbia. From 1872 to 1876 he assisted in revising the American Encyclopedia. In 1887 he joined the staff of the new Scribner’s Magazine, serving as its editor until he resigned in 1914 and was made general editorial adviser of publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons. In 1908 Burlingame apparently rejected Willa Cather’s story “The Enchanted Bluff” for Scribner’s, but in 1912 he wrote her a “friendly note” when he accepted “A Likeness” (published in 1913) (#0241). She then met with him to discuss Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant’s work.