Hambourg, Isabelle McClung (1877-1938). Cather’s longtime friend. Cather met Isabelle McClung, the daughter of a socially prominent, Pittsburgh (PA) family, in 1899 in the dressing room of actress Lizzie Hudson Collier. McClung seems to have been the first woman to reciprocate Cather’s romantic affections. In 1901, McClung invited Cather to live in her family’s large home in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh. She and Cather traveled together to Europe in 1902, and McClung accompanied Cather on a visit home to Nebraska in 1905. After Cather moved to New York City in 1906, she frequently visited McClung in Pittsburgh, finding the familiar house a congenial place to write, and McClung visited New York City, staying with Cather and Edith Lewis. Cather and McClung also rented a vacation cabin in Cherry Valley, NY, in 1911, and traveled together to Virginia in 1913. In late 1915, shortly after the death of her father, Judge Samuel McClung, Isabelle announced her intention to marry violinist Jan Hambourg. Cather reacted negatively to the marriage (which took place in 1916) but eventually reconciled herself to it, enjoying long visits with the Hambourgs in Toronto, Ontario, in 1921 and France in 1923 and 1935. Cather and Edith Lewis also spent time with the Hambourgs in Paris is 1930 and 1935. The latter trip occurred after Isabelle sought treatment in the U.S. for the kidney disease that killed her several years later in Italy. Her death came only four months after Cather’s brother Douglass died, leaving her feeling bereft. “No other living person cared as much about my work, through thirty-eight years,” she wrote her brother Roscoe (#2137). After Isabelle’s death, Jan sent to Cather the six hundred letters from Cather to Isabelle in his possession, and Cather destroyed them, although a few letters from Isabelle and Cather postcards to Isabelle are extant.

Fremstad, Olive (1871-1951). Swedish-American opera singer. Born in Sweden, Ann Olivia Rundquist was adopted by a Scandinavian-American couple, the Fremstads, who raised her first in Kristiania (now Oslo), Norway, and then in Minnesota. She moved to New York City to study piano in 1890 and then to Germany to study voice with Lilli Lehmann. After a successful career in Europe as a mezzo-soprano, she made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in 1903, where she specialized in singing soprano roles in operas by Richard Wagner. Willa Cather first met Fremstad in 1913 while researching “Three American Singers,” an article for McClure’s Magazine in which Cather clearly prefers Fremstad as “the most interesting kind of American” over Geraldine Farrar and Louise Homer. Through 1916 Cather and Fremstad were in close and regular contact in person and through letters, although Cather’s letters to Fremstad have not been located and their friendship evidently cooled. Fremstad inspired many aspects of the story, personality, and career of Thea Kronborg, heroine of The Song of the Lark (1915), and she approved of the novel, although Cather did not want readers to identify the character too closely with her. Fremstad married and divorced twice. During the period Cather and Fremstad were in regular contact Fremstad lived as a couple with Mary Watkins (later Cushing) who, after Fremstad’s death, published a biography of her, The Rainbow Bridge (1954).