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Register of the Virna Woods Collection,
1870-1956
Mss3
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Title: Virna Woods Collection,
Date (inclusive): 1870-1956
Collection number: Mss3
Creator:
J. William Harris
Extent: 6 linear ft.
Repository:
University of the Pacific. Library. Holt-Atherton Department of
Special Collections
Stockton, CA 95211
Shelf location: For current information on the location of
these materials, please consult the library's online catalog.
Language: English.
Collection is open for research.
[Identification of item], Virna Woods Collection, Mss3, Holt-Atherton
Department of Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library
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.
Woods seems to have given up school teaching for freelance writing at
the time of her success in the Magazine of Poetry competition. From spring 1891
she devoted much energy to fiction, publishing several short stories, including
"Two loves in a life" (1891), and three novels, "A modern Magdalene" (1894),
"Jason Hildreth's identity" (1897) and "An elusive lover" (1898). Not much is
known of her whereabouts during the 1890s, although she seems to have lived
briefly in Pennsylvania (1893) and evidence in her writing suggests that she
spent much time sightseeing in Arizona and along the Pacific Coast as far north
as British Columbia and as far south as San Diego (1895). It is also possible
that she spent some time in France, although this has not been established with
any certainty. There is little question, however, that she continued to think
of Sacramento as her home.
For reasons that are not entirely clear, Virna Woods' redirected her
energies during the late 1890s from fiction to drama. While Woods' short
stories and novels had all been set in California and Ohio and had been
realistic and contemporary both in subject and in language, the greater number
of her plays---a notable exception being "Lord Strathmore"---were historical in
setting and written in a style more closely related to that of her poetry than
of her prose. She nevertheless interested New York producer/actor Frederick
Warde in "Horatius," a play set in ancient Rome (1900), and, when Warde took
"Horatius" on a national tour (1901) Woods traveled with his company for the
better part of a year, dispatching numerous letters to her sister that describe
in detail what she saw of the country and its theatres. Early in 1903, while
working in San Francisco with the cast of
"Lord Strathmore," Virna Woods became ill, developed pneumonia and
suddenly died at the age of 38.
Although her sister, Anna, made some effort to see that Virna Woods'
plays continued to be performed, by 1910, they had disappeared from sight.
Evidence in Woods' correspondence suggests that these works had never been box
office successes, and, in any case, the advent of moving pictures soon diverted
public attention from all live theatrical epics. That Woods' fiction likewise
drifted into obscurity is less easy to explain. There is much for a present-day
Californian to appreciate in her loving, but not over-romantic, prose
evocations of that long-lost, semi-rural coastal landscape of ruined missions
and pepper trees that likewise inspired our California Arts and Crafts
movement.
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.
BOX LIST
BOX 1: Biographical Materials;
Correspondence; Business Papers
BOX 2: Poetry
BOX 3: Prose:
Manuscripts
BOX 4: Prose: Published Works
BOX 5: Drama: Early Plays
(through 1899)
BOX 6: Drama: Griselda & Lalla Rookh (1900)
BOX
7: Drama: A Knight Errant (1901)
BOX 8: Drama: Miscellaneous
Plays
BOX 9: Literary Fragments & Notes
BOX 10:
Memorabilia
BOX 11: Photographs: Individual Prints
BOX 12:
Photographs: Albums