An Obscurity among Obscurities: Miss Laura de Valin
Jean Lee Cole, July 31, 2017
One thing that has surprised me about the members of the WLCB is that so many were published authors. As I’ve been reviewing the transcription of the minutes taken by the indefatigable Lydia Crane, I’ve looked up members here and there to see what became of the works they read during the club meetings, to see if they had a life outside of the club.
Today I found an interesting connection between Club members’ writings and Hunter’s research on the Lutherville Female Seminary.
The minutes for April 10, 1900 relate that a Club member named Miss Laura de Valin read two of her poems, “In the Heyday,” and “A Sonnet.” A quick initial Google search for “Laura de Valin” uncovered an interesting document held in the Johns Hopkins University Library Special Collections, a piece of sheet music titled “A Parting Ode” written by Miss de Valin for the Lutherville Female Seminary in 1859!
I am leaping to the conclusion that this Laura de Valin is the same as the one who belonged to the WLCB because their names are so unusual– additional genealogical research would be necessary to confirm that this is true.
Assuming it is, then finding this sheet music tells us something about the age of Miss de Valin, and also links her with the Lutherville Female Seminary. Based on the amateurish quality of the verse, I would guess that de Valin may have been a student at the Seminary when she wrote this “ode,” which would make her about 60 years old at the time of the Club meeting where she read her poems.
That would mean that she would have been a young woman during the Civil War, which perhaps explains why she remained unmarried. Membership records show that she lived at 1214 Madison Ave., just a few blocks west of where I live now. She joined in 1899-1900, and left the club (or passed away) sometime before the 1904-1905 season. So her tenure in the club was brief.
Miss de Valin, I discovered, also was a playwright– a “Bibliography of Plays by Marylanders, 1870-1916” published in the Spring 1972 issue of the Maryland Historical Magazine lists two plays by a Laura V. de Valin: The Chaperon; A Comic Opera in Three Acts, from 1892, and Elisa, A Drama in Five Acts, from the same year.
In search of copies of the plays, I checked the MD Historical Society catalog (MDHS publishes the Maryland Historical Magazine, so I thought perhaps the bibliography of plays was based on manuscripts in their collection). I didn’t find the plays there, but I did find out that she edited a journal titled The New Pedagogue: A Monthly Journal Devoted to the Public School Interest of Baltimore, right around the time she belonged to the club. So that tells you that she was a teacher. Perhaps she was a teacher, rather than a student, at Luther Female Seminary. (Again, I am assuming that all of these Laura de Valins are the same person.)
It all makes you wonder: who was Laura V. de Valin? What kind of life did she lead? Did she crave a theatrical life, or was she committed to her work as a teacher? Did she live alone, or with family? What was she like? And what were her dreams?
Only further research will be able to answer these questions about this member of the Club–and we will probably never know about her dreams. But this little tidbit of information points to the ambition and wide-ranging intellect and interests of even the most obscure Club members.
This content was migrated from the The WLCB log: Documenting the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore 1890-1941