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.

Lewis, Lillie Gould (1858-1928). Edith Lewis's mother. Born to New England Quaker parents who had recently migrated to the Midwest, Lillie Gould was sent east from Davenport, IA, to Elmira, NY, to be educated. In 1879, she and Henry Euclid Lewis, a New Hampshire-born, Dartmouth-educated lawyer from Moline, IL, married in the Davenport Unitarian Church. In 1881, they relocated with their first child, Harold Gould Lewis, to Lincoln, NE, where Lillie soon gave birth to Edith. She had four more children while in Lincoln: Helen, Ruth, and two others who died in childhood there. She was an active clubwoman engaged in social reform issues. In 1909, after the collapse of Henry’s various business enterprises in Nebraska, the family moved to the Boston, MA, area. Around 1923, Lillie moved in with their daughter Ruth in Brooklyn, NY, while Henry went to live with their daughter Helen in California. In the summer of 1927, she suffered a stroke while visiting Harold and his family in Springfield, MA, where she died in May 1928.

Lewis, Ruth Putnam (1893-1954). Edith Lewis's sister. Born in Lincoln, NE, to Henry Euclid Lewis and Lillie Gould Lewis, Ruth moved east to the Boston, MA, area with her family in 1909 and enrolled in the Sergeant School for Physical Education in 1914, graduating in 1919. Her first job as a physical education teacher was in Buffalo, NY. In the 1920s she moved to Brooklyn, NY, to teach at a private girls' school. She also worked summers at girls' camps in New England. Living in Brooklyn, she had regular contact with her sister Edith and with Willa Cather. From 1941 to 1946, she was U.S.O. Women's Activities Secretary at the Brooklyn Navy Y.M.C.A., and then worked in leadership development for the Girl Scouts. She helped her sister Edith make arrangements for Cather’s funeral and burial. She was hospitalized with cancer in Brooklyn in 1953, and died in a hospital in Braintree, MA, where her brother Harold lived.

Lewis, Harold Gould (1880-1962). American electrical engineer; Edith Lewis’s brother. The first child of Henry Euclid Lewis and Lillie Gould Lewis, Harold Lewis was raised in Lincoln, NE, and Kearney, NE. He studied engineering at the University of Nebraska and Columbia University and worked for most of his career for Westinghouse Electric. After his parents moved from Lincoln to the Boston, MA, area in 1909, he lived with them until his 1921 marriage to Alice Griffin, with whom he had two daughters.

Lewis, Henry Euclid (1949-1926). American lawyer and businessman; Edith Lewis’s father. Born to parents of Puritan and Huguenot ancestry, Henry Lewis was raised on a farm outside Claremont, NH. He worked his way through Dartmouth College, graduating in 1872. After teaching in New Jersey and Vermont, he moved to Moline, IL, to read law under his brother Eugene, and there met and married Lillie Gould of Davenport, IA. After the birth of their son Harold, they moved to Lincoln, NE, in 1881, where their daughter Edith was born. They had four more children in Lincoln: Helen, Ruth, and two who died in childhood. Over the course of twenty-five years, Henry Lewis worked as a lawyer, land broker, and banker in Lincoln and started irrigation and farming concerns in central Nebraska. In 1909, after the collapse of his various business enterprises, the family moved to the Boston, MA, area, where he sold real estate. At the time of his death, he was living with his daughter Helen and her family near Fresno, CA.

Morgan, Helen Chace Lewis (1894-1984). Edith Lewis’s sister. The youngest child of Henry Euclid Lewis and Lillie Gould Lewis, Helen Lewis was born and raised in Lincoln, NE, until 1909, when her family relocated to the Boston, MA, area. In 1917 she graduated from the Sargent School for Physical Training and taught physical education in private schools in Pennsylvania and Brooklyn, NY. In 1920, she married Harold Philip Morgan; the couple had two daughters, and they lived in Lincoln, NE, the Fresno, CA, area (where her father was residing with them at the time of his 1926 death), and Seattle, WA. After her husband’s 1956 death, Helen Morgan moved to Long Island, NY; she visited her sister Edith Lewis regularly in New York City and arranged for her funeral and her burial in Jaffrey, NH, at Willa Cather’s side.

Deland, Margaret (1857-1955). American novelist, poet, and memoirist. Born Margaretta Wade Campbell in Alleghany, PA, Deland attended Cooper Union in New York City. After her marriage to Lorin Deland, she moved to Boston, MA. In her long and prolific career, she wrote frequently about the challenges facing women, tackling controversial issues such as divorce and extramarital sex. The McClure Newspaper Syndicate syndicated some of Deland’s works, and S. S. McClure may have introduced Cather to Deland as early as 1905. In 1905, Witter Bynner, then working for McClure, Phillips, & Co., sent a copy of The Troll Garden (1905) to Deland, who regretted the “curious lack of a sense of beauty” in Cather’s stories (#0105). Nevertheless by 1908, when Cather made her second trip to Boston on assignment for McClure's Magazine, she and Deland were friends, and Cather subsequently was a guest in Deland’s home on trips to Boston. Although Cather and Deland corresponded through at least 1917, Cather’s letters to her have not been located.

Cushing, Mary Fitch Watkins (1889-1974). American editor, critic, and author. Born in New Haven, CT, to Schureman Halsted Watkins and Helen Randall Smith Watkins, Mary Watkins studied at the Art Students League in New York City. She met Wagnerian opera star Olive Fremstad in 1911. Her memoir The Rainbow Bridge (1954) recounts her time as Fremstad’s personal secretary (1911-1918), including their friendship with Cather. During WWI, Cushing served in the women’s motor corps in France. Later she married Edward Cushing, a music critic and editor; they had a daughter, Antonia Cushing (later Stone). Cushing worked as a dance critic and editor for the New York Herald Tribune and became a freelance magazine writer in 1934. Watkins also wrote First Aid to the Opera-Goer (1924) and Behind the Scenes at the Opera (1925).

Cather, Roscoe (1877-1945) (“Ross”). Cather’s brother. Roscoe was born in Virginia, the second child and oldest son of Charles and Virginia Cather. After graduating from Red Cloud (NE) High School in 1895, he taught country school for two years, attended the University of Nebraska in Lincoln for one year (1897-1898), taught high school in Carlton, NE, and Oxford, NE, and finally became superintendent of schools in Fullerton, NE. There he met fellow teacher Meta Schaper, whom he married in 1907. They relocated to Lander, WY, in 1909, where he opened an abstract office and where their three children, Virginia and twins Margaret and Elizabeth, were born. In 1921, they moved to Casper, WY, where Roscoe became president of the Wyoming Trust Company, and in 1937 to Colusa, CA, where Roscoe and his brother Douglass had acquired a controlling interest in the First Savings Bank of Colusa. Roscoe served as president of the bank until his death. Willa visited Roscoe and his family in Wyoming several times and shared important travel experiences with them, including a 1926 trip to New Mexico with Roscoe, Meta, and their children and a 1941 San Francisco vacation with Roscoe and Meta. She also relied on him to handle family-related business as well as personal financial matters, and he was one of her chief correspondents throughout her life. Roscoe served as a prototype for one of the twin brothers in the Templeton family in “Old Mrs. Harris” (1932).