History

Poet Virginia Moore was 26 years old when she stood before Cliffside. She was newly divorced from Louis Untermeyer, whom many considered to be the master poetry critic of his time, and left alone to raise their infant son, John. Moore wrote in her memoir that despite Cliffside’s “dreadful condition,” it struck a chord: “I stood in the parlor amid stacks of old magazines festooned with spiders, and my heart said, ‘Yes!’”

Moore found in Cliffside two things: a refuge from the maelstrom that had been her brief marriage, and the inspiration to write. She would publish 15 books and carve out a distinguished writing career that lasted more than 50 years. She was reviewed, mostly favorably, by The New Yorker and The New York Times and shared friendships with many literary luminaries, including Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate. A poet first, she later turned her attention to biography and nonfiction, writing books on Emily Brontë, W.B. Yeats, and the Madisons of Virginia.

Moore had a penchant for precision in dress and bearing, but her writing was effusive—so much so that a New York Times critic chastised her in 1954 for her “rhapsodic manner, her many question marks and exclamation points.” One of her books, Scottsville on the James, published 40 years ago in celebration of the town’s 225th anniversary, is Moore’s love letter to the town that knew her until her death in 1993, one month shy of her 90th birthday. To the people of Scottsville, Moore was simply “Miss Virginia.”

Moore was born in 1903 in Harvard, Nebraska, to Virginians Ethel Daniel and John Fitzallen Moore. At age 16, she enrolled at what was then Hollins College in Roanoke and majored in both English and philosophy. She was spell-bound studying Aeschylus and Plato, and was the editor of Hollins Magazine during her three years there. When Moore graduated in 1923, she revealed her ambition when she wrote, “Why strive for anything less than ultimates?”