Weisz, Irene Miner (1881-1971). Musician; Cather’s lifelong friend. Born in Red Cloud, NE, the youngest child of James L. Miner and Julia Erickson Miner, Irene Miner was educated in Red Cloud, graduating in 1898 and played with the Cather children as part of the play town of Sandy Point and in amateur theatricals. She studied piano with local teachers, such as Mrs. P.E.B. Sill, then went to the Chicago College of Music from 1899 to 1901. She met clerk Charles Weisz, later president of the A.F. Shaw insurance company, there; they married in late 1915, settling in Chicago. She visited Red Cloud frequently, but also travelled in the American West and then to Europe in 1921 and around the world in 1934. Cather corresponded with Irene Miner Weisz for many years and sometimes stayed with her in Chicago when travelling to and from the West. My Ántonia is dedicated to Irene, model for Nina Harling in the novel, and to her sister Carrie Miner Sherwood.

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.