Cather, Mary Virginia Boak (1850-1931) (“Virginia” or “Jenny”). Cather’s mother. Born in 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.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1840-1864). American novelist and short-story writer. Born in Salem, MA, Nathaniel Hawthorne graduated from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, ME, in 1825, and returned home to Salem to devote himself to writing. Several times during his career Hawthorne accepted government jobs to supplement his meager income from writing. His appointment at the Boston Custom House in 1839 features in his novel The Scarlet Letter (1851). In 1842, he married Sophia Peabody, and for three years they lived in Concord, MA, where Hawthorne was exposed to figures in the Transcendental movement. James T. Fields of Ticknor & Fields helped Hawthorne to gain critical recognition and to achieve a modest commercial success from his novels and short story collections in the 1850s. Hawthorne died in Plymouth, NH, while traveling with Franklin Pierce, his friend and former United States president. During Cather’s childhood her family owned volumes of Hawthorne’s fiction published by Ticknor & Fields, and she referred to him frequently in her newspaper criticism of the 1890s. In “The Novel Démeublé” (1922) she praised his technique in The Scarlet Letter, and in her preface to The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett (1925), she classed the novel with Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs as one of “three American books which have the possibility of a long, long life.” However, she classed his House of the Seven Gables (1851) with “stuffy or dull” required reading in high schools (#1649). In 1925 she also spoke at a symposium at Bowdoin commemorating the centennial of the graduation of Hawthorne and his classmate Henry Wadsorth Longfellow.