Willa Cather and Edith Lewis
Clover Cottage, which was part of the Asticou Inn, in Northwest Harbor
(The women spent five summers at Clover Cottage during the 1940's. Cather wrote her last book, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, at Clover Cottage.)
(The women spent five summers at Clover Cottage during the 1940's. Cather wrote her last book, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, at Clover Cottage.)
Many of those who have explored the career of iconic Nebraskan writer Willa Cather have mentioned that she was guarded about the personal details of her life. While this careful privacy may have been at least partially cultivated in order to hide her lesbian identity, Willa’s loving partnership with writer and editor Edith Lewis was an open secret to all who knew them. The two lived and worked together for four decades during which Edith’s editorial skills exerted an important influence on Willa’s writing. Their relationship unfolded in New York, in the women’s community of Whale Cove on Canada’s Grand Manan Island, and, for the last four summers of Willa’s life, in Northeast Harbor on Mount Desert Island. Cementing their lifelong connection, Willa and Edith are buried together in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, another of the couple’s beloved getaway spots.
The oldest of seven children, Willa Cather was born on December 7, 1873 in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, into a family of gentleman farmers. Her parents, Charles and Jennie Boak Cather, both had Appalachian roots stretching back four generations, and the deep divisions of the Civil War had also torn through their extended family, with some remaining loyal to the South and others, firmly anti-slavery, supporting the Union. As many later lesbians would, Willa chose her own name, combining her given Wilella and her family nickname, Willie. A tomboy from childhood, she sometimes signed her name, “William Cather” and dressed in boys’ clothes.
When she was nine years old, Willa’s family moved west to Red Cloud, Nebraska, a new frontier state whose broad plains and vigorous immigrant culture could hardly have been more different from the Virginia hills and entrenched society that had felt somewhat claustrophobic to a curious young girl. In a 1921 interview for the Omaha Bee, Willa described her love for her new home: “by the end of the first autumn the shaggy grass country had gripped me with a passion that I have never been able to shake.” The Nebraska landscape and its population would become central to her writing, and, along with her formal schooling, her most important education would be the stories she heard from the old Swedish, French Canadian, and Eastern European immigrant women in her community.
It was while she was a student at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln that Willa developed the ambition to be a writer. She talked and dressed in a forthright and confident style that might be called butch today, and she gained a reputation writing columns and theater reviews for local journals while still a student. She also began a close relationship with Louise Pound (1872–1958), a classmate who later became a respected scholar and advocate for women’s athletics. In a letter to a friend Willa described a romantic date with Louise in a roguishly suggestive tone: “driving a certain fair maid over the country with one hand, sometimes, indeed, with no hand at all. But she did not seem to mind my method of driving, even when we went off banks and over hay stacks, and as for me—I drive with one hand all night in my sleep.”
After her graduation in 1896, Willa took a job in Pittsburgh as managing editor of a woman’s magazine called Home Monthly. There, in 1899, she met Isabelle McClung (1877-1938), the daughter of a prominent Pittsburgh family, who became one of her great loves. By 1901, she was living in Isabelle’s family home and sharing her bedroom. The McClungs supported Willa’s ambitions as a writer and set up a study for her. Isabelle’s marriage to the Russian violinist Jan Hambourg (1882-1947) was one of the great disappointments of Willa’s life. When Isabelle died, Jan returned to Willa over 600 letters she had written to Isabelle, saved through the years. In keeping with her secretive nature, Willa destroyed them all.
In 1903, on a visit with her family in Nebraska, Willa met Edith Lewis, a Nebraska native who had recently graduated from Smith College. In her 1955 memoir, Willa Cather Living, Edith reveals how quickly she was smitten at that first meeting: “the feature one noticed particularly was her eyes. They were dark blue eyes, with dark lashes; and I know no way of describing them, except to say that they were the eyes of genius . . . Willa Cather’s eyes were like a direct communication of her spirit. The whole of herself was in her look, in that transparently clear, level, unshrinking gaze that seemed to know everything there was to be known about both herself and you.”
Edith Lewis was born on December 22, 1881 and raised in Lincoln, Nebraska, the daughter of Henry Euclid Lewis and Lillie Gould Lewis. Her roots reached as far back in New England as Willa’s did in Virginia, with Puritans and French Huguenots on her father’s side and Quakers on her mother’s. Henry Lewis moved west seeking economic opportunity, first to Illinois, where he met and married Lillie, the daughter of a furniture maker. In 1881, with one young son and Edith still in the womb, the couple moved to Lincoln, Nebraska where Henry began a successful practice as a lawyer and financial broker. A number of other family members had settled in Lincoln, and Edith grew up enmeshed in local society.
Perhaps this is why, after one year at the University of Nebraska, she transferred to Smith College in Massachusetts. The traditional housewifely role of Midwest society matron did not appeal to her, and she sought intellectual stimulation. She had already begun publishing stories in local journals, and she continued to study writing at Smith.
By the time Edith graduated from Smith, she had already read some of Willa’s critical essays and stories, so she was prepared to be impressed when the two met at the home of Sarah Harris (1821-1912), founder and editor of the weekly Lincoln Courier. It did not take long for Willa and Edith to become friends. When Edith finally realized her ambition to leave Lincoln for the more bohemian world of New York City, as an advertising copywriter and editor for McClure's Magazine, Willa invited her to stay with her at Isabelle’s family home in Pittsburgh. Willa was by this time working there as a teacher, and the next two summer vacations included long visits at Edith’s Manhattan apartment.
With Edith’s encouragement to prioritize her writing and a job offer from McClure’s, Willa finally left her teaching job in Pittsburgh to move to New York in 1906. In 1909, the two moved in together to an apartment on Washington Square, then in 1913 they took the second story of a house at 5 Bank Street, where they remained an active part of the intellectual and artistic community of Greenwich Village.
While Cather transitioned to a full-time career as a writer, Edith maintained her job as an editor, first at McClure’s and later at Every Week Magazine, where she was managing editor. Equally important was her work editing and even rewriting sections of Willa’s manuscripts. She abandoned her own writing career almost as soon as she met Willa, perhaps feeling, like some other literary wives, that her role was not to compete with her partner’s “genius” but to promote and support it.
In 1922, Willa and Edith vacationed for the first time at Whale Cove, an all-women’s enclave on Grand Manan Island in New Brunswick, Canada. Founded in the early 1900s by four women physical education teachers from Boston, the community of cottages had become a retreat for women who enjoyed the company of women. Willa and Edith felt so at home there that they bought a summer home in 1926. They visited Whale Cove, every summer, often stopping in Jaffrey, New Hampshire to spend a few weeks at the Shattuck Inn on their way home to New York in the fall. The only breaks in this pattern were the summers of 1925 and 1926, spent in the bohemian community of Taos, New Mexico, and the years following the advent of World War II in 1942. Unable to cross the Canadian border to Whale Cove during the war years, Edith and Willa spent the summers of 1942-45 on Mount Desert Island, Maine, renting Clover Cottage in the Asticou neighborhood of Northeast Harbor.
On April 24, 1947, Willa died at home in Manhattan. The cause of death was listed as cerebral hemorrhage, but it is more likely that she died from a metastasis of the breast cancer that had resulted in mastectomy in 1946. Secretive to the end, she did not tell her family about the cancer and Edith never talked about it. After Willa’s death, Edith also followed her instructions to destroy her final unfinished manuscript. Edith did revive her writing career again to publish the memoir Willa Cather Living in 1953. It was an affectionate, if not revealing, portrait, showcasing Edith’s perceptive and lyrical writing. When Edith died on August 11, 1972, she was buried next to Willa in Jaffrey.
A tribute to their relationship that neither Willa not Edith would likely have foreseen is a two-volume (so far) series of “Willa Cather and Edith Lewis Mysteries.” On the Rocks (2013) and Death Comes (2017) by Susan A. Hallgarth, reimagine the couple in Whale Cove and Taos, respectively, acting as amateur detectives when they are confronted with murder.
More information:
Homestead, Melissa. “Looking at Willa Cather’s Lesbian Partnership and Domestic World: The Lesser-Told Story of Cather and Edith Lewis.” Literary Hub. May 18, 2022. https://lithub.com/looking-at-willa-cathers-lesbian-partnership-and-domestic-world/
Homestead, Melissa. The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis. Oxford UP, 2021.
Homestead, Melissa J. and Anne L. Kaufman. “Nebraska, New England, New York: Mapping the Foreground of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis's Creative Partnership.”
Western American Literature, Vol. 43, No. 1 (Spring 2008), pp. 41-69
Lewis, Edith. Willa Cather Living. U of Nebraska P, 1953
O’Brien, Sharon. “The Thing Not Named: Willa Cather as a Lesbian Writer.” Signs. Vol. 9. No. 4, Summer 1984, pp. 576-99.
Rose, Phyllis. “The Point of View was Masculine.” New York Times. September 11, 1983, p.15
Smallwood, Christine. “Making a Scene: Willa Cather’s Correspondence.” Harper’s. May 2013.
Woodress, James. Willa Cather: A Literary Life. U of Nebraska P, 1987.
“Lure of Nebraska Irresistible, Says Noted Authoress,” Omaha Bee. October 29, 1921, p.2.
“The Willa Cather Cottage.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMhx2XNgEIc
The oldest of seven children, Willa Cather was born on December 7, 1873 in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, into a family of gentleman farmers. Her parents, Charles and Jennie Boak Cather, both had Appalachian roots stretching back four generations, and the deep divisions of the Civil War had also torn through their extended family, with some remaining loyal to the South and others, firmly anti-slavery, supporting the Union. As many later lesbians would, Willa chose her own name, combining her given Wilella and her family nickname, Willie. A tomboy from childhood, she sometimes signed her name, “William Cather” and dressed in boys’ clothes.
When she was nine years old, Willa’s family moved west to Red Cloud, Nebraska, a new frontier state whose broad plains and vigorous immigrant culture could hardly have been more different from the Virginia hills and entrenched society that had felt somewhat claustrophobic to a curious young girl. In a 1921 interview for the Omaha Bee, Willa described her love for her new home: “by the end of the first autumn the shaggy grass country had gripped me with a passion that I have never been able to shake.” The Nebraska landscape and its population would become central to her writing, and, along with her formal schooling, her most important education would be the stories she heard from the old Swedish, French Canadian, and Eastern European immigrant women in her community.
It was while she was a student at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln that Willa developed the ambition to be a writer. She talked and dressed in a forthright and confident style that might be called butch today, and she gained a reputation writing columns and theater reviews for local journals while still a student. She also began a close relationship with Louise Pound (1872–1958), a classmate who later became a respected scholar and advocate for women’s athletics. In a letter to a friend Willa described a romantic date with Louise in a roguishly suggestive tone: “driving a certain fair maid over the country with one hand, sometimes, indeed, with no hand at all. But she did not seem to mind my method of driving, even when we went off banks and over hay stacks, and as for me—I drive with one hand all night in my sleep.”
After her graduation in 1896, Willa took a job in Pittsburgh as managing editor of a woman’s magazine called Home Monthly. There, in 1899, she met Isabelle McClung (1877-1938), the daughter of a prominent Pittsburgh family, who became one of her great loves. By 1901, she was living in Isabelle’s family home and sharing her bedroom. The McClungs supported Willa’s ambitions as a writer and set up a study for her. Isabelle’s marriage to the Russian violinist Jan Hambourg (1882-1947) was one of the great disappointments of Willa’s life. When Isabelle died, Jan returned to Willa over 600 letters she had written to Isabelle, saved through the years. In keeping with her secretive nature, Willa destroyed them all.
In 1903, on a visit with her family in Nebraska, Willa met Edith Lewis, a Nebraska native who had recently graduated from Smith College. In her 1955 memoir, Willa Cather Living, Edith reveals how quickly she was smitten at that first meeting: “the feature one noticed particularly was her eyes. They were dark blue eyes, with dark lashes; and I know no way of describing them, except to say that they were the eyes of genius . . . Willa Cather’s eyes were like a direct communication of her spirit. The whole of herself was in her look, in that transparently clear, level, unshrinking gaze that seemed to know everything there was to be known about both herself and you.”
Edith Lewis was born on December 22, 1881 and raised in Lincoln, Nebraska, the daughter of Henry Euclid Lewis and Lillie Gould Lewis. Her roots reached as far back in New England as Willa’s did in Virginia, with Puritans and French Huguenots on her father’s side and Quakers on her mother’s. Henry Lewis moved west seeking economic opportunity, first to Illinois, where he met and married Lillie, the daughter of a furniture maker. In 1881, with one young son and Edith still in the womb, the couple moved to Lincoln, Nebraska where Henry began a successful practice as a lawyer and financial broker. A number of other family members had settled in Lincoln, and Edith grew up enmeshed in local society.
Perhaps this is why, after one year at the University of Nebraska, she transferred to Smith College in Massachusetts. The traditional housewifely role of Midwest society matron did not appeal to her, and she sought intellectual stimulation. She had already begun publishing stories in local journals, and she continued to study writing at Smith.
By the time Edith graduated from Smith, she had already read some of Willa’s critical essays and stories, so she was prepared to be impressed when the two met at the home of Sarah Harris (1821-1912), founder and editor of the weekly Lincoln Courier. It did not take long for Willa and Edith to become friends. When Edith finally realized her ambition to leave Lincoln for the more bohemian world of New York City, as an advertising copywriter and editor for McClure's Magazine, Willa invited her to stay with her at Isabelle’s family home in Pittsburgh. Willa was by this time working there as a teacher, and the next two summer vacations included long visits at Edith’s Manhattan apartment.
With Edith’s encouragement to prioritize her writing and a job offer from McClure’s, Willa finally left her teaching job in Pittsburgh to move to New York in 1906. In 1909, the two moved in together to an apartment on Washington Square, then in 1913 they took the second story of a house at 5 Bank Street, where they remained an active part of the intellectual and artistic community of Greenwich Village.
While Cather transitioned to a full-time career as a writer, Edith maintained her job as an editor, first at McClure’s and later at Every Week Magazine, where she was managing editor. Equally important was her work editing and even rewriting sections of Willa’s manuscripts. She abandoned her own writing career almost as soon as she met Willa, perhaps feeling, like some other literary wives, that her role was not to compete with her partner’s “genius” but to promote and support it.
In 1922, Willa and Edith vacationed for the first time at Whale Cove, an all-women’s enclave on Grand Manan Island in New Brunswick, Canada. Founded in the early 1900s by four women physical education teachers from Boston, the community of cottages had become a retreat for women who enjoyed the company of women. Willa and Edith felt so at home there that they bought a summer home in 1926. They visited Whale Cove, every summer, often stopping in Jaffrey, New Hampshire to spend a few weeks at the Shattuck Inn on their way home to New York in the fall. The only breaks in this pattern were the summers of 1925 and 1926, spent in the bohemian community of Taos, New Mexico, and the years following the advent of World War II in 1942. Unable to cross the Canadian border to Whale Cove during the war years, Edith and Willa spent the summers of 1942-45 on Mount Desert Island, Maine, renting Clover Cottage in the Asticou neighborhood of Northeast Harbor.
On April 24, 1947, Willa died at home in Manhattan. The cause of death was listed as cerebral hemorrhage, but it is more likely that she died from a metastasis of the breast cancer that had resulted in mastectomy in 1946. Secretive to the end, she did not tell her family about the cancer and Edith never talked about it. After Willa’s death, Edith also followed her instructions to destroy her final unfinished manuscript. Edith did revive her writing career again to publish the memoir Willa Cather Living in 1953. It was an affectionate, if not revealing, portrait, showcasing Edith’s perceptive and lyrical writing. When Edith died on August 11, 1972, she was buried next to Willa in Jaffrey.
A tribute to their relationship that neither Willa not Edith would likely have foreseen is a two-volume (so far) series of “Willa Cather and Edith Lewis Mysteries.” On the Rocks (2013) and Death Comes (2017) by Susan A. Hallgarth, reimagine the couple in Whale Cove and Taos, respectively, acting as amateur detectives when they are confronted with murder.
More information:
Homestead, Melissa. “Looking at Willa Cather’s Lesbian Partnership and Domestic World: The Lesser-Told Story of Cather and Edith Lewis.” Literary Hub. May 18, 2022. https://lithub.com/looking-at-willa-cathers-lesbian-partnership-and-domestic-world/
Homestead, Melissa. The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis. Oxford UP, 2021.
Homestead, Melissa J. and Anne L. Kaufman. “Nebraska, New England, New York: Mapping the Foreground of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis's Creative Partnership.”
Western American Literature, Vol. 43, No. 1 (Spring 2008), pp. 41-69
Lewis, Edith. Willa Cather Living. U of Nebraska P, 1953
O’Brien, Sharon. “The Thing Not Named: Willa Cather as a Lesbian Writer.” Signs. Vol. 9. No. 4, Summer 1984, pp. 576-99.
Rose, Phyllis. “The Point of View was Masculine.” New York Times. September 11, 1983, p.15
Smallwood, Christine. “Making a Scene: Willa Cather’s Correspondence.” Harper’s. May 2013.
Woodress, James. Willa Cather: A Literary Life. U of Nebraska P, 1987.
“Lure of Nebraska Irresistible, Says Noted Authoress,” Omaha Bee. October 29, 1921, p.2.
“The Willa Cather Cottage.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMhx2XNgEIc