author

Marion Forster Gilmore

b. 1887

An early 20th-century American poet and dramatist, she is best known for Virginia: A Tragedy and Other Poems, published in Louisville in 1910. Her surviving record is slim, which gives her work an intriguing sense of discovery for modern readers.

1 Audiobook

Virginia: A Tragedy, and Other Poems

Virginia: A Tragedy, and Other Poems

by Marion Forster Gilmore

About the author

Marion Forster Gilmore was born on November 27, 1887, in Louisville, Kentucky. The basic biographical record that is easy to confirm today is modest: genealogical records list her death on January 11, 1965, in Los Angeles, California.

She is known as the author of Virginia: A Tragedy and Other Poems, a volume published in Louisville in 1910 by John P. Morton & Company. The book combines a verse drama on the Roman story of Virginia with a collection of poems, and its dedication and acknowledgments suggest a writer working seriously within the literary magazine culture of her time.

Because so little widely documented background is available, Gilmore stands out less for a heavily chronicled public life than for the survival of this one distinctive book. For readers of overlooked literature, that makes her especially interesting: a poet whose voice has lasted, even when many details of her life remain hard to pin down.