Barlow-Brewster, Achsah (1878-1945). Expatriate American painter. Born in New Haven, CT, Achsah Brewster graduated in 1902 from Smith College, where Edith Lewis had become her roommate in 1899, inaugurating a long friendship. After college, Achsah moved to New York City to study painting at the Art Students League and the New York School of Art. After she returned from a year of study in France, fellow student (and later poet) Vachel Lindsay introduced her to Earl Brewster. She may have met Willa Cather as early as 1904, when Cather, visiting New York from Pittsburgh, stayed with Edith Lewis on Washington Square. In 1910, she and Earl Brewster married and moved to Europe, returning to the U.S. only once, in 1923. From 1910 through 1935, they lived in various locations in France (where their daughter Harwood was born in 1912) and in Italy (where they met D. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda in 1921), while also traveling widely in Europe and to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and India. Edith Lewis visited Achsah and Earl in Ravello, Italy, in 1914 and 1920 and in Cyr-sur-Mer, France, in 1930 (with Cather) and 1935. When Earl, Achsah, and Harwood moved to Paris in the early 1920s, they became friend Isabelle McClung Hambourg and Jan Hambourg. In 1935, Achsah and Earl moved to the Himalayan region of India, where she died ten years later after a long illness.

Brewster, Earl (1878-1957). Expatriate American painter. Born in Chagrin Falls, OH, Earl Brewster attended the Cleveland Institute of Art for a year before moving to New York City in 1899 to study at the Art Students League and the New York School of Art. He married fellow painter Achsah Barlow in 1910. They immediately moved to Europe, returning to the U.S. only once, in 1923. From 1910 through 1935, Earl and Achsah lived in France (where their daughter Harwood was born in 1912) and Italy (where they met D. H. Lawrence in 1921), while traveling widely in Europe and to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and India. Edith Lewis visited Achsah and Earl in Ravello, Italy, in 1914 and 1920 and in Cyr-sur-Mer, France, in 1930 (with Cather) and 1935. When Earl, Achsah, and Harwood moved to Paris in the early 1920s, they became friend Isabelle McClung Hambourg and Jan Hambourg. Earl had begun studying eastern religions early in his life, including the Vedanta school of Hindu religious philosophy, and he incorporated Buddhist iconography into his paintings. In 1935, the Brewsters moved to the Himalayan region of India, where he died more than two decades later.

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?”

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.