Barrie, James Matthew (1860-1937). British journalist, novelist, and playwright. Barrie is best known for his character Peter Pan, first created in the play Peter Pan (1904) and later the subject of the novels Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906) and Peter Pan and Wendy (1911). His earliest success as an author was in regional sketches based on his childhood memories of Kirriemuir, Forfarshire, Scotland. His novel Sentimental Tommy (1896), about a boy who clings to childhood, seems to have inspired the title of Cather's early story "Tommy the Unsentimental" (1896). After establishing contact with Cather indirectly in the early 1930s through Stephen Tennant, Barrie began corresponding with her directly, and Barrie expressed particular admiration for Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and My Ántonia (1918). Of the latter, Barrie wrote to her, "Your Antonia? No, she is my Antonia, and though I have just found her I have always known her" (#1870). After his death Cather stated that she had several letters from Barrie in her possession, but no such letters have been found.

Meredith, George (1828-1909). English novelist and poet. The son of a tailor, small family legacies enabled Meredith to acquire some formal education in England and in Germany by the time he was sixteen. His early unhappy marriage informed some of the poetry in Modern Love (1863). His first novel to achieve recognition was The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), followed by Evan Harrington, or, He Would Be a Gentleman (1860). The Egoist (1879) and Diana of the Crossways (1885) established his popularity and his reputation as a writer of brilliant romantic and psychological comedies and as a creator of complex, spirited women characters. Many of his later works were written at his home at Box Hill, Surrey. By the 1890s he was widely considered the greatest living British novelist. Cather discussed his work in her early journalism; she was in London when he died and attended his funeral.

Shaw, George Bernard (1856-1950) (“Bernard”). Anglo-Irish playwright and activist. Born in Dublin, Bernard Shaw moved to London in 1876, where he met critic William Archer and became a theater and music critic himself. His first success as a playwright was Arms and the Man (1894), followed by The Devil’s Disciple (1897). He had many successes in the early twentieth century with his iconoclastic and satirical works: Major Barbara (1905), Man and Superman (1905), Androcles and the Lion (1912), Pygmalion (1913), Saint Joan (1923), and many others. Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1925. Cather was aware of Shaw’s work from 1895 on; she admired him as a dramatist but disagreed with many of his ideas.