What was the name of the nurse who inspired the character Catherine Barkley?

Agnes von Kurowsky was the nurse who inspired Catherine Barkley in Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway met her in 1918 while recovering from wounds at an American Red Cross hospital in Milan during World War I.

Hemingway was 19 when he arrived at the Milan hospital after being seriously injured while serving as a Red Cross ambulance driver on the Italian Front. Kurowsky, who was seven years older, cared for him, and the two developed a romantic relationship. Their time together later became one of the formative emotional experiences behind Hemingway’s war fiction.

Catherine Barkley is not a literal portrait of Kurowsky. In A Farewell to Arms, published in 1929, Hemingway transformed elements of their relationship into a fictional romance set against the Italian campaign. The novel’s lieutenant, Frederic Henry, resembles aspects of Hemingway’s wartime experience, while Catherine’s character serves the story’s themes of love, grief, and separation.

After Hemingway returned to the United States in January 1919, Kurowsky wrote to tell him that she had become engaged to an Italian officer. That real-life disappointment is often discussed alongside the novel, but the book remains a work of fiction rather than a direct memoir.