Fisher, Dorothy Canfield (1879-1958). American novelist; educational and social reformer. Dorothy Canfield and Willa Cather became friends in 1891 at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, where Canfield's father, James Canfield, had come to serve as Chancellor. The family moved to Columbus, OH, in 1895 when James Canfield assumed the presidency of Ohio State University, from which Dorothy graduated in 1899. She then followed her father to New York City, where he became Librarian of Columbia University, and she pursued graduate study in Romance Languages at the University of Paris and Columbia, from which she earned a PhD in 1904. On Cather’s first trip to Europe, she spent time in France and England with Canfield, including an awkward visit to the home of poet A.E. Housman. Cather derived the central character of “The Profile” (1907) from Canfield’s friend Evelyn Osborne, whom Cather had met in Europe. Cather and Canfield became estranged for more than a decade because Canfield objected to the story’s planned inclusion in The Troll Garden (1905). Canfield married John Redwood Fisher in 1907, and their primary residence was Arlington, VT. Canfield Fisher had spent 1916-1918 in France engaging in war relief work, and Cather’s consultation with her about the accuracy of her depiction of wartime France in One of Ours (1922) led them to reconcile. In 1925 Canfield Fisher became a founding member of the Book of the Month Club selection committee. She published her novels (most of them very popular) under the name Dorothy Canfield but her various nonfiction works as Dorothy Canfield Fisher.

Cather, Myrtle Bartlett (1884-1960). Wife of G.P. Cather Born in Webster County, NE to a successful farmer and his wife, Myrtle Bartlett was a childhood friend of G.P. Cather (Willa Cather’s cousin). After an awkward courtship (Myrtle turned down G.P.’s first proposal because of ill health), the two married in June 1910. The marriage quickly became strained because of Myrtle’s extensive health-related travels to the Southwest and G.P.’s frequent hunting trips and financial irresponsibility. Myrtle belonged to the Women’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist-Episcopal Church in Bladen, NE. Her husband was killed in action in France in World War I and was buried in a military cemetery there. In 1921, over the objections of G.P.’s parents and to Willa Cather’s dismay, she had his remains repatriated and reinterred in Bladen after a grand military funeral. Myrtle served as the prototype for Enid Wheeler in One of Ours (1922).

Wagner, Richard (1813-1883). German composer. Richard Wagner was born in Leipzig, Germany. He taught himself to play the piano and the principles of composition, partly by studying the scores of Beethoven's works, and was also deeply influenced by his reading of Shakespeare, Schiller, and Goethe. His early operas before Rienzi (1842) were unsuccessful. In the wake of its success he began to develop his more characteristic style. Although The Flying Dutchman (1843), Tannhäuser (1845), and Lohengrin (1850) were popular, critics were often hostile, and his involvement with the Revolution of 1848 in Germany forced him to flee into exile in Zurich, where he wrote on social and musical issues, and composed the poem, The Ring of the Nibelung, upon which his four Ring operas were based. The difficulty of staging these titanic works led him to put them aside for such works as Tristan and Isolde (1859). His financial difficulties were alleviated when Ludvig II of Bavaria became his patron. Wagner toured Europe to raise money for a new kind of theater at Bayreuth, which would be capable of presenting the Ring; the work was first given in its entirety at Bayreuth in 1876. His last work was Parsifal (1882). Cather was an avid opera fan, and references to his works appear throughout her works, most prominently “A Wagner Matinee” (1904) and The Song of the Lark (1915). She recommended Wagner’s autobiography My Life to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, praising it as “all action” (#0219), and wrote a preface for a 1925 edition of Gertrude Hall’s Wagnerian Romances (1925).