Virginia Vignettes

Sapphira is the protagonist of Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), the last novel by Willa Cather and the Virginia-born writer’s only book set entirely in the state. Based on an incident in Cather’s own family, in which her maternal grandmother helped a slave escape in 1856, the novel details the complicated marriage of Henry [...]

Mrs. Burton Harrison, also known as Constance Cary Harrison, was a prolific American novelist of the late nineteenth century who came from a prominent Virginia family. As a young woman, she witnessed the destruction of the Civil War and nursed the Confederate wounded in Manassas and Richmond. After the war, Harrison toured Europe, married, and [...]

Sarah Patton Boyle was one of Virginia’s most prominent white civil rights activist during the 1950s and 1960s and author of the widely acclaimed autobiography, The Desegregated Heart: A Virginian’s Stand in Time of Transition (1962). Her efforts began with an awkward and hesitant welcome to the University of Virginia’s first black law student in [...]

A Voyage to the Moon; with Some Account of the Manners and Customs, Science and Philosophy, of the People of Morosofia, and Other Lunarians was a satirical science fiction novel in the tradition of Jonathan Swift. Published in 1827 under the pseudonym Joseph Atterley, it poked fun at the gullible masses, fashion, useless inventions, and [...]

George Tucker was a lawyer, philosopher, economist, historian, novelist, politician, and teacher. Born in Bermuda and cousin to the famed jurist St. George Tucker, Tucker served in the House of Delegates (1815-1816) representing Pittsylvania County and won election to three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives (1819-1825) before, at the invitation of Thomas Jefferson, [...]

The Virginia Wolves—sometimes spelled the Virginia Woolfs, and named after the English essayist and novelist—was an all-girl rock band that played in the Roanoke area early in the 1960s. They might have been lost to history were it not for the fact that two young writers attending Hollins College at the time, Annie Doak and [...]

John Dos Passos was. The Lost Generation writer, best known for the left-leaning U.S.A. trilogy of novels, was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1896 but raised by a mother from Petersburg, Virginia. In 1949, after a long legal battle, he was able to establish claim to his father’s farm at Spence’s Point in Westmoreland County, [...]

They were mad because of things he wrote as editor of Richmond’s Southern Literary Messenger. Poe began work at the journal in 1835, increasing its circulation, publishing his own stories and poems, and developing important contacts with the northern literary establishment. Still, Poe became best known for his caustic literary criticism, such as a December [...]

Sheldon Vanauken did. The Lynchburg College professor—he taught English there from 1948 until 1980—engaged in a passionate love affair with one Jean Palmer Davis while the two were at Oxford in the 1950s. C. S. Lewis, the famous author of The Lion the Witch, and the Wardrobe, taught at Oxford at the time, and he [...]

Marion Harland did. The writer was born in Amelia County and spent much of her early life in Richmond. Over the course of 65 years, she penned a number of novels that seemed to enact her own divided loyalties over secession, slavery, and Reconstruction. Later in life, however, her interests turned more domestic. Struggling for [...]