Nevin, Anne Paul (c. 1863-1942). Wife of Ethelbert Nevin. Born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA, Anne Paul married Ethelbert Nevin in Boston, MA, in 1888, where their first child, Paul, was born the same year. Following her husband as he traveled for his musical career, she gave birth to their daughter Dorothy in Berlin, Germany, in 1892. In 1898, financial straits forced a move to Vineacre, the estate of her husband’s family in Sewickley, PA, near the Edgeworth station in suburban Pittsburgh. Cather met the Nevins that year, and in “Evenings at Vineacre,” published in the Lincoln Courier, she described Anne Nevin as “a good deal like her husband’s music” in her “idealism and delicate sympathy and sweetness.” In 1900, the Nevins moved to New Haven, CT, where Ethelbert died in 1901. After his death, Anne joined in the successful lobbying effort on behalf of the Copyright Act of 1909 and was active in the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers. She died in Greenwich, CT.

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.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822). British poet. Shelley was born in Horsham, Sussex, England to Timothy and Elizabeth Shelley. He attended Eton College and Oxford, the latter of which he was expelled from in 1810 after co-authoring a pamphlet titled The Necessity of Atheism with his classmate, Thomas Jefferson Hogg. Shelley is best known as one of the most prominent figures in the British Romantic movement, with some of his most famous poems including “Mont Blanc” (1816), “Ozymandias” (1818), and “To a Skylark” (1820). Shelley married Harriet Westbrook in 1811; he later eloped with Mary Godwin, whom he married in 1816 after his first wife's suicide. Percy Shelley drowned off the north-western Italian coast while returning from visiting Leigh Hunt and Lord Byron. In a 1929 letter to Henry Van Dyke, Cather expressed mixed feelings about Shelley’s poetry (see #3290).