Miss Emily Virginia Mason, biographer and anthologist, was born at
Lexington, Kentucky, October 15, 1815, the sister of Stevens Thompson
Mason, first governor of Michigan. She was educated in Kentucky schools
and in a female seminary at Troy, New York. From 1845 until 1861 Miss
Mason lived in Fairfax county, Virginia, but when the Civil War began
she left her home and volunteered in the Confederate States hospital
service; and she was matron successively of hospitals in the Virginia
towns of Greenbrier, White Sulphur Springs, Charlottesville, Lynchburg,
and Richmond. Miss Mason won a wide reputation in this work, becoming
one of the best loved of Southern women. Almost immediately after the
war her first literary work was published, an anthology of _The Southern
Poems of the War_ (Baltimore, 1867) which was one of the first
collection issued of verse which owed its origin to the war. Her second
book was what she always said was the first life of Lee, though John
Esten Cooke's account of the great soldier appeared about the same
time, entitled _A Popular Life of General Robert Edward Lee_ (Baltimore,
1871). This was followed by her edition of _The Journal of a Young Lady
of Virginia in 1798_ (1871), which enjoyed wide popularity among
Virginians of her generation. Miss Mason went to Paris, France, about
1870, and for the following fifteen years she was associate principal of
an American school for young women. Upon her return to this country she
established herself in an attractive old Southern home at Georgetown, D.
C., in which she spent the remainder of her life. Miss Mason's last
literary work was _Memories of a Hospital Matron_, which appeared in
_The Atlantic Monthly_ for September and October of 1902. She was an
able writer and a most remarkable woman in many respects. Miss Mason
died at Georgetown, D. C., February 16, 1909, at the great age of
ninety-four years.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Southern Writers_, by W. P. Trent (New York, 1905);
_The Washington Post_ (February 17, 1909).