Luhan, Mabel Dodge (1879-1962). American patron of the arts and memoirist. Born Mabel Ganson into a wealthy Buffalo, NY, family, Mabel Evans traveled to Paris, France, in 1904 after the death of her first husband. She met and married Edwin Dodge there and moved with him to a villa in Florence, Italy, where they collected art and Mabel conducted a salon. She moved to New York City in 1912 and separated from her husband soon after (they divorced in 1916). In her Fifth Avenue apartment near Washington Square, she reestablished her salon and supported modern art and radical political causes. Cather may have known Mabel Dodge slightly during her New York year but came to know her better in New Mexico, where she moved in 1917 with her third husband, Maurice Sterne, from whom she divorced in 1922. Mabel married Antonio Lujan, a Taos Pueblo Indian, in 1923. Thereafter she called herself Mabel Dodge Luhan. When Cather and Edith Lewis traveled to New Mexico in June 1925, Luhan invited Cather to visit her in Taos, seeking advice on her manuscript memoirs of her life. Lewis and Cather’s long stay in Taos inspired Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). Cather briefly returned to Luhan's Taos compound in 1926, when Luhan was absent, and although Luhan invited Cather and Lewis back, they did not return to New Mexico. In 1928, Cather encouraged Alfred Knopf to consider publishing the early volumes of Luhan’s memoirs, praising them as “intensely interesting and alive” (#2589). However, Harcourt Brace published all four volumes of Luhan’s memoirs, Background (1933), European Experiences (1935), Movers and Shakers (1936), and Edge of Taos Desert (1937). Cather also read the later portions in manuscript. Cather praised Luhan’s memoir of D.H. Lawrence during his New Mexico years, Lorenzo in Taos (Knopf 1932), as “the best portrait there ever will be of Lawrence” (#1036). Luhan lived in Taos until her death.

Brett, Dorothy (1883-1977) (“Brett”). British painter. Born into an aristocratic family, Dorothy Brett studied at the Slade School of Art in London from 1901 to 1916 and became associated with the Bloomsbury Group. In 1924, she accepted an invitation from D. H. and Frieda Lawrence to travel to the U.S., where they hoped to start a utopian society in Taos, NM. They stopped in New York City on the way, where the three visited Willa Cather and Edith Lewis at their Five Bank Street apartment. In 1925, Cather and Lewis also saw Brett again in Taos at the Lawrence’s ranch (Brett occupied her own cabin nearby). Although the Lawrences left New Mexico, Brett stayed on, becoming a U.S. citizen in 1938. She described her experiences with the Lawrences (including meeting Cather and Lewis) in Lawrence and Brett: A Friendship (1933). She died in Taos.

Lawrence, David Herbert (1885-1930) (“D.H.”). British novelist. Born in Nottingham, England, into a working-class family, Lawrence left high school in 1901 to work as a clerk, although he soon secured a position as a pupil teacher and earned his teacher’s certificate at the University of Nottingham. His first novel, The White Peacock (1911), was published by William Heinemann while he was still a schoolteacher. After a bout with pneumonia ended his teaching career, he met and fell in love with Frieda Weekley, the wife of one of his professors at Nottingham. Frieda left her husband and three young children to travel to Germany with Lawrence. After they had settled in Italy, Heinemann rejected Lawrence’s novel Paul Morel as indecent. The publisher Duckworth encouraged him to revise it, and published as Sons and Lovers (1913) it made his reputation. He and Frieda returned to England and married in London in 1914. Lawrence struggled to make a living: The Rainbow (1915) was ruled obscene and withdrawn from circulation, and Women in Love was repeatedly rejected by publishers before publication in 1920. After World War I he and Frieda returned to Italy, settling in Capri, where in 1921 they met expatriate American painters Earl Brewster and Achsah Barlow-Brewster, with whom they traveled to Ceylon in 1922. The Lawrences eventually traveled to the U.S. by sea to the west coast and spent time in New Mexico and Mexico before returning to Europe in early 1923. In July 1923, the Brewsters gave the Lawrences Cather and Edith Lewis’s address in New York City, and D. H. and Frieda, accompanied by Dorothy Brett, visited 5 Bank Street. From New York City the Lawrences and Brett traveled to New Mexico and settled on a small derelict ranch, which D.H. purchased from Mabel Dodge Luhan, and where he wrote fiction set in the U.S. Southwest and Mexico. During their July 1925 visit to Luhan’s compound in Taos, NM, Cather and Lewis visited the Lawrences at their ranch. The Lawrences soon returned to Europe, however, where D.H. died of tuberculosis. His literary reputation and fame increased after his death. Cather’s attitude towards him was ambivalent. She liked him personally, praised him as “unquestionably the most gifted writer of his generation” (#1118), and praised memoirs of him by Luhan and the Brewsters. However, in “The Novel Démeublé” (1922), she criticizes Lawrence for failing to distinguish between “emotion and mere sensory reactions” and reducing his characters in The Rainbow to “mere animal pulp.” “Can one imagine anything more terrible,” she queries, “than the story of Romeo and Juliet, rewritten in prose by Mr. Lawrence?”

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.