It was in the course of 1899 that she met her great love, Isabelle McClung, daughter of Samuel McClung, a wealthy and prominent Pittsburgh judge, who had presided ten years earlier at the trial of Alexander Berkman, would-be assassin of Henry Clay Frick and companion of fellow anarchist Emma Goldman. The meeting took place in the dressing room of actress Lizzie Collier and the attraction was immediate. Cultivated, well traveled, literate, winningly feminine, Isabelle was at once Willa’s other half. The McClungs’ spacious, sternly Scotch home at 1180 Murray Hill Avenue, at the crest of the street, its front porch banked with honeysuckle, in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, was a second home to Willa, and within two years she’d moved in, writing in a converted sewing room at the top of the house recalling her attic room in Red Cloud and presaging Godfrey St. Peter’s sewing room study in The Professor’s House. There she worked for the remainder of her Pittsburgh years, evidently much loved by Judge McClung and his wife, Fannie; and often returned, after moving to New York, to write in the third-floor sewing room. Isabelle was a willing muse. Willa would declare, following Isabelle’s death in 1938, that all her novels and stories had been written for Isabelle.
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