Virginia Woodward Cloud (1861-1938)
Cloud was born in Baltimore and lived in there her entire life. She never married, instead focusing her energy on her career and assisting other writers, notably women, attain the same level of success she did. Cloud gained a local and national reputation as a writer of poetry and fiction. She had been a promising writer from a young age; according to family lore, she exhibited so much poetic talent as a teenager that a Western publisher returned one of her submitted poems because they thought it had been plagiarized. A member of the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore from its inception, she served as a member of the Board of Managers between 1905-1915. She shared many of her own works in the club’s meetings and also demonstrated her skill as a reader by frequently performing readings of other members’ works. Comments on Cloud’s stories are scattered throughout the Club’s meeting minutes, where fellow members described her fiction as bold, eloquent, and humorous. One of them, Ellen Duvall, noted that “Her prose and verse are full of this deep joy in life, this instinctive rapture in the presence of Nature and of man.”
Sources
Cloud, Virginia Woodward. The Collected Poems of Virginia Woodward Cloud. Henry Harrison, 1939.
Fleming, W. L. The South in the Building of the Nation: Southern Biography. vol. 11, Southern Historical Publication Society, 1909.
“Virginia W. Cloud, Noted Poet, is Dead.” Baltimore Sun, Apr. 6, 1928: 22.
Contributors
Tara Brooky; Alyssa Schilke