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.

Bokum, Frances Amanda Butcher (1888-1987) (“Fanny”). American newspaper critic and bookstore owner. Born in Fredonia, KS, Butcher moved to Chicago, IL, as a child. She received an A.A. from Lewis Institute in 1908 and a BA from the University of Chicago in 1910. In 1911, Floyd Dell of the Chicago Evening Post assigned her to review Alexander’s Bridge (1912). Cather wrote the anonymous reviewer care of the Post, beginning their correspondence and friendship. From 1913 until her retirement in 1963, Butcher wrote for the Chicago Tribune, becoming literary editor in 1922. She ran Fanny Butcher Books in Chicago from 1919 until 1927, when she sold it to Doubleday. Cather frequently saw Butcher when she changed trains in Chicago and closely followed Butcher’s reviews of her works, often writing to her about them. She also relied on Butcher’s knowledge of the book business and particularly book distribution in the Midwest. Their extant correspondence begins in 1920, although in her memoir Many Lives—One Love (1972), Butcher paraphrases earlier letters. Butcher married Richard Drummond Bokum in 1935.