Southwick, Helen Louise Cather (1918-2004). Cather’s niece. Helen was born in Red Cloud, NE, to Willa Cather’s brother James and his wife Ethel. Willa was a doting aunt on her visits to Red Cloud. In 1931, Helen moved with her family to Long Beach, CA, where she graduated high school and attended Long Beach City College. In 1939, Helen returned to Red Cloud to help care for her maternal grandmother and then enrolled in the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, where she met her future husband, Philip Southwick. After graduating in 1941, she briefly returned to California to work in the personnel department of Douglas Aircraft company, but married Southwick in Lincoln in 1942, and then moved with him to Champaign, IL. When Philip’s employment took them to Plainfield, NJ, she frequently spent time with her aunt in New York City. In 1946, the Southwicks moved to Pittsburgh, PA, where their son James was born. In later years Helen worked as a school librarian and was active in the Cather Foundation in Red Cloud, NE. She was a beneficiary of Cather’s literary estate, and when Edith Lewis died in 1972 she bequeathed Cather books and manuscripts to Helen and her brother Charles Cather. Helen donated her share of these materials and Willa Cather’s letters to her to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Lewis, Edith Labaree (1881-1972). Magazine editor, advertising copywriter, and Cather's domestic partner. Born in Lincoln, NE, to Henry Euclid Lewis and Lillie Gould Lewis, Edith Lewis attended the preparatory school associated with the University of Nebraska, earning college credits from the University before transferring to Smith College in Northampton, MA, in 1899. She received an A.B. in English from Smith in 1902 and returned home to teach elementary school. She met Willa Cather in the summer of 1903 at the home of Sarah Harris, publisher of the Lincoln Courier. Moving to New York City soon afterward, Lewis settled into a studio on Washington Square and found work at the Century Publishing Company. Cather was her guest when she visited the city from Pittsburgh. In 1906, at Cather's suggestion, Lewis applied for a position as an editorial proofreader at McClure's Magazine, and the two women worked together on the McClure's staff for six years. In 1908, they moved into a shared apartment at 82 Washington Place, and then, in 1912, to Five Bank Street. Lewis left McClure's in 1915 to become managing editor of Every Week Magazine, where she stayed until the magazine folded in 1918. In 1919 she began a long career as an advertising copywriter at the J. Walter Thompson Co. In 1926 Edith Lewis acquired the land on which she and Cather built their cottage on Grand Manan Island. When they lost their apartment on Bank Street to subway construction in 1927, they shared quarters at the Grosvenor Hotel when they were both in New York City. In 1932 they took an apartment at 570 Park Avenue. Throughout their relationship, Lewis was closely involved in Cather's creative process, reading and editing her work in pre-publication forms. Cather's will appointed Lewis as executor of her literary estate and a beneficiary of her literary trust. Lewis authorized E.K. Brown as Cather's first biographer and published her own memoir of Cather, Willa Cather Living (1953). She remained in their Park Avenue apartment after Cather's death and died there after a long period of illness and invalidism. She is buried at Cather's side in Jaffrey, NH.

Robeson, Paul (1898-1976). American singer, actor, and activist. Born in Princeton, NJ, youngest son of minister William Drew Robeson, a formerly enslaved man, and Maria Bustill Robeson, Paul Robeson won an academic scholarship to Rutgers University, where he was a two-time football All-American as well as a valedictorian for the class of 1919. He played in the National Football League while earning a law degree from Columbia University, where he met Eslanda Cardozo Goode; they married in 1921 and had one child, Paul Robeson, Jr. With his wife’s encouragement he began acting in New York and London, in plays such as Othello and Show Boat, and in British and American films; he was also a concert singer and made many recordings starting in 1925. The Robesons returned to the U.S. to live in 1939, where his pro-Russian and anti-fascist political activism brought him surveillance from the FBI and led to his passport being revoked after World War II, damaging his career. He never backed down, and resumed his singing career in the 1960s. Cather met Robeson at the Menuhins’ New York apartment in 1930 and immediately admired him.

Robeson, Eslanda Cardozo Goode (1895-1965) (“Essie”). American activist and writer. Born in Washington, DC, Eslanda Goode graduated from Columbia University with a degree in chemistry. She became head histological chemist in the surgical pathological department at New York-Presbyterian hospital. In 1921 she married Paul Robeson; they had one child, Paul Robeson, Jr., in 1927. Eslanda Robeson managed her husband’s career, encouraging him to act. The Robesons lived abroad for much of the late 1920s and in the 1930s, and she travelled in the Soviet Union and in Africa. Eslanda graduated from the London School of Economics in 1937 and received a PhD in anthropology from the Hartford Seminary in 1946, the same year she published her African Journey. Her passport was revoked in 1953 because of her activism. It is unclear whether Cather ever met her.

Hagen, Uta Thyra (1919-2004). German American actor and teacher. Uta Hagen was born in Gottingen, Germany, to Thyra Amalie Leisner and Oskar Frank Leonard Hagen. In 1924 her family moved to Madison, WI, where she attended high school and college. In the coming decades Hagen enjoyed an increasingly successful stage acting career. She played the role of Martha in the original production of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) and earned critical acclaim playing Blanche in the original Broadway productions of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). Along with her work on stage, Hagen also taught method acting for decades at HB Studio, working with students such as Robert DeNiro, Gene Wilder, and Whoopi Goldberg. Cather watched Hagen play Desdemona in a production of Othello alongside Paul Robeson in the titular role, and in a 1944 letter to her niece Cather praises Hagen's performance as “the real surprise and thrill of the evening.”

Markova, Alicia (1910-2004). British ballerina. Alicia Markova, originally named Lilian Alicia Marks, was born in London, England, the first daughter born to Eileen Barry and Arthur Marks. She began dancing ballet at the age of eight, and by the age of ten she made her professional debut in a production of the pantomime Dick Whittington at the Kennington Theatre. In 1924 Serge Diaghilev invited her to join his ballet company, the Ballets Russes, and changed her name to Alicia Markova, based on the idea that all great ballerinas were Russian. Markova performed and toured Europe with the company for four and a half years, and eventually moved back to London in 1929 after Diaghilev’s death. Markova became increasingly renowned as a ballet dancer in the following years, becoming the first prima ballerina of the Vic-Wells Ballet, now the Royal Ballet, and the first English ballerina to dance the lead in Swan Lake and Giselle. Markova retired from performing in 1963, and she spent the rest of her career working as an educator, spokesperson, and choreographer within the world of ballet.