Scholars disagree about Cather's sexual identity. Some believe it impossible or anachronistic to determine whether she had same-sex attraction,[148][149] while others disagree.[150][151][152] Researcher Deborah Carlin suggests that denial of Cather being a lesbian is rooted in treating same-sex desire "as an insult to Cather and her reputation", rather than a neutral historical perspective.[153] Melissa Homestead has argued that Cather was attracted to Edith Lewis, and in so doing, asked: "What kind of evidence is needed to establish this as a lesbian relationship? Photographs of the two of them in bed together? She was an integral part of Cather's life, creatively and personally."[18] Beyond her own relationships with women, Cather's reliance on male characters has been used to support the idea of her same-sex attraction.[154][G] Harold Bloom calls her "erotically evasive in her art" due to prevailing "societal taboos".[158]
In any event, throughout Cather's adult life, her closest relationships were with women. These included her college friend Louise Pound; the Pittsburgh socialite Isabelle McClung, with whom Cather traveled to Europe and at whose Toronto home she stayed for prolonged visits;[159] the opera singer Olive Fremstad;[160] and most notably, the editor Edith Lewis, with whom Cather lived the last 39 years of her life.[161]
Cather's relationship with Lewis began in the early 1900s. They lived together in a series of apartments in New York City from 1908 until Cather's death in 1947. From 1913 to 1927, Cather and Lewis lived at No. 5 Bank Street in Greenwich Village.[162] They moved when the apartment was scheduled for demolition during the construction of the Broadway–Seventh Avenue New York City Subway line (now the 1, 2, and 3 trains).[163][164] While Lewis was selected as the literary trustee for Cather's estate,[54] she was not merely a secretary for Cather's documents but an integral part of Cather's creative process.[165]
Beginning in 1922, Cather spent summers on the island of Grand Manan in New Brunswick, where she bought a cottage in Whale Cove on the Bay of Fundy. This is where her short story, "Before Breakfast", is set.[19][166] She valued the seclusion of the island and did not mind that her cottage had neither indoor plumbing nor electricity. Anyone wishing to reach her could do so by telegraph or mail.[29]: 415 In 1940, she stopped visiting Grand Manan after Canada's entrance to World War II, as travel was considerably more difficult; she also began a long recuperation from gallbladder surgery in 1942 that restricted travel.[167][137]: 266–268
A resolutely private person, Cather destroyed many drafts, personal papers, and letters, asking others to do the same.[168] While many complied, some did not.[169] Her will restricted the ability of scholars to quote from the personal papers that remain.[126] But in April 2013, The Selected Letters of Willa Cather—a collection of 566 letters Cather wrote to friends, family, and literary acquaintances such as Thornton Wilder and F. Scott Fitzgerald—was published, two years after the death of Cather's nephew and second literary executor, Charles Cather. Willa Cather's correspondence revealed the complexity of her character and inner world.[170] The letters do not disclose any intimate details about Cather's personal life, but they do "make clear that [her] primary emotional attachments were to women."[171] The Willa Cather Archive at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln works to digitize her complete body of writing, including private correspondence and published work. As of 2021, about 2,100 letters have been made freely available to the public, in addition to transcription of her own published writing.[172][173]
