Description
The Virna Woods Collection contains manuscripts of her plays, prose and
poetry, as well as memorabilia, photographs, correspondence and biographical
materials relating to Ms. Woods.
Background
Virna Woods (1864-1903) was an American poet, playwright and novelist.
Born to machinist, John B. Woods (1832-1905) and Virginia Pidgeon Woods
(1837-1914), she grew up in Zanesville, Ohio, where she attended public high
school and normal school. At age eighteen she came with her family to
Sacramento, California (1883), where her father worked for the Southern Pacific
Railroad and her older sister, Anna, became a city librarian. Virna taught in
various Sacramento and El Dorado County schools (1884-1889), while at the same
time writing poetry and submitting her work for publication. Woods' mother was
active in the Women's Christian Temperance Movement and the family apparently
spent some time each year enjoying the liquor-free Chautauquas at Pacific
Grove. There Virna Woods gave public readings of some of her earlier poems. By
1887 she had published poetry in The Overland Monthly, The Chautauquan and
other periodicals of the day. Her work won first prize in a competition
sponsored by the Magazine of Poetry (1890) and the following year she published
a first volume, The Amazons, a verse play set in ancient Greece. The young
author had a flair for languages and is said to have been fluent in French,
Italian, Latin and Greek. She had a particular affinity for French, initiating
correspondence with several French men of letters as early as 1889 and
ultimately composing at least one play, Un chevalier errant, in French.