Jewett, Mary Rice (1847-1930). Sarah Orne Jewett’s sister. Born in Exeter, NH, to Dr. Theodore Herman Jewett and Caroline Frances Perry Jewett, Mary was the older sister of Sarah Orne Jewett. They both attended Berwick Academy in Berwick, ME, and as adults they continued to live together in the family home in South Berwick, where Mary was active in a local women’s club and charitable work. On Sarah’s death, Mary and Annie Adams Fields became co-executors of Sarah’s literary estate. Cather’s friendship with Mary seems to date primarily from this period after Sarah’s death, and Cather made several visits to Mary at the Jewett family home in Maine. In 1924, with Mary Jewett’s approval, Ferris Greenslet of Houghton Mifflin asked Cather to select and write an introduction to Sarah Jewett’s stories. Shortly thereafter, Burton Rascoe reported critical remarks by Cather about Sarah Jewett’s works and the Jewett family in his “Bookman’s Day Book” column in the New York Tribune. Mary read these remarks as reprinted in the Boston Transcript, was offended, and sought to have Cather removed as editor of her sister’s works. However, Cather and Greenslet persuaded her to reverse this decision (Cather’s letters pleading her case have not been located). Mary Jewett died in South Berwick, and her nephew Theodore Jewett Eastman succeeded to the executorship of Sarah Jewett’s literary estate.

Cather, Mary Virginia Boak (1850-1931) (“Virginia” or “Jenny”). Cather’s mother. Born in the Virginia to William Lee Boak and Rachel Seibert Boak, Virginia was educated in Baltimore, MD, and was a schoolteacher until her marriage to Charles Fectigue Cather in 1872. Her husband’s family were primarily Union supporters during the Civil War while her family supported the Confederacy (three brothers served in the Confederate Army although their mother opposed slavery). After her marriage she tried to help unite the divided family. Four of her children, Willa, Roscoe, Charles Douglas, and Jessica Virginia, were born in Virginia, while three, James Donald, Elsie Margaret, and John Esten, were born in Nebraska after the family moved there in 1883. Despite occasional differences, Cather remained in affectionate contact with her mother, who remained in Red Cloud, NE, where the family settled in 1884. After her husband’s death in 1928 Virginia Cather suffered a stroke while visiting her children and their families in California. She spent nearly three years in a sanitarium in Pasadena, CA, unable to speak. Willa Cather visited her there several times but was unable to travel quickly enough from Grand Manan to Red Cloud for her funeral and interment after she died in Pasadena in 1931. Virginia Cather was the prototype for Victoria Templeton in “Old Mrs. Harris” (1932), which Willa Cather completed shortly before her mother’s death.

Raffy, Katharine Foote (1881-1970). American soprano. Born in Boston to composer Arthur Foote and Kate Knowlton, Katharine Foote trained and performed as a soprano. Cather apparently met Katherine Foote and her father in Boston in 1908 through Annie Adams Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett. In 1916 Katharine Foote went to France as a member of the Voluntary Aid Detachment, caring for wounded soldiers in hospitals, an experience documented in her book 88 bis and V.I.H.: Letters from Two Hospitals (1919). She married Frenchman Henri Raffy, whom she had met during her V.A.D. service. Katharine Raffy persuaded her father to write his autobiography late in his life, and she arranged for its 1946 publication and wrote a preface to it.

Guiney, Louise Imogen (1861-1920). American poet and critic. Guiney was born in Roxbury, MA, to Irish Catholic parents. When her father died in 1887 from wounds suffered as a Union Army officer in the Civil War, the strain on family finances nearly ended her education, but she graduated from Elmhurst Academy, an elite convent school in Providence, RI. For the next twenty-one years, she lived with her mother and sister Grace in Auburndale and Boston, MA. She began publishing poetry and essays in the 1880s and quickly became part of the Boston-area cultural elite, numbering among her friends Annie Adams Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett. In 1894 she received a patronage appointment as Auburndale post-mistress to supplement her literary income. Anti-Catholic protestors boycotted her post office, causing her income to drop, but counter-protesters, literary figures and Catholics from throughout the country, ordered their stamps from her to salvage her income. In 1899 she became a cataloger at the Boston Public Library, likely with the intervention of Alice Jordan, her Auburndale friend and neighbor. In 1901, Guiney moved with her aunt to England, where she studied at Oxford University but struggled financially. In theme and content, Guiney’s poetry evoked seventeenth-century British lyric poetry. In the Pittsburgh Gazette in 1902 Cather praised Guiniey’s “excellence in expression and the mastery of meter” and later wrote aspiring poet Zoë Akins that the “richness and delicacy and restraint” of Guiney’s poetry should be a model for contemporary poets (#0152). As an editor at McClure’s Magazine Cather purchased Guiney’s poetry and met her briefly in 1909 in Auburndale, where Guiney was visiting her mother. Thereafter their correspondence became more personal. Guiney died in England. In the 1920s Cather wanted to edit a selection of Guiney’s verse, but Ferris Greenslet at Houghton Mifflin was unable to come to an understanding with Grace Guiney.