Author Sharon Pajka beside the grave of novelist and women’s rights advocate Mary Johnston in Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery (Photo by Jay Paul)
Sharon Pajka thinks about cemeteries a lot. She has been doing so since she was a child, when her grandfather, a genealogist, would steer family reunions toward a nearby cemetery.
“He called me ‘Sweet Pea,’ ” Pajka recalls. “He would hand me a little card, and he would say, ‘Sweet Pea, find me these relatives,’ and I would run around the cemetery and look for family members.”
Pajka, a Hanover County resident who is now an English professor at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., has combined her interest in cemeteries with her interest in women authors to produce her first book, “Women Writers Buried in Virginia.”
The 44 writers include:
- Ellen Glasgow, a Pulitzer Prize winner who portrayed the changing world of the South, although Pajka says Glasgow believed that Richmond could not get beyond the Civil War (Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond)
- Ella Howard Bryan, a writer of popular pulp fiction westerns who wrote under the nom de plume Clinton Dangerfield, and who was a favorite of President Teddy Roosevelt (Woodland Cemetery, Ashland)
- Mary Roberts Rinehart, a mystery writer who has been called “the American Agatha Christie” (Arlington National Cemetery)
- Anne Spencer, an African American poet who was a force during the Harlem Renaissance (Forest Hill Burial Park, Lynchburg)
- V.C. Andrews, a Gothic author who was so famous that a judge ruled that her name itself was taxable (Olive Branch Cemetery, Portsmouth)
“There are 23 cemeteries in the book,” Pajka says. “Most of them have one or two or three women authors. Arlington [National Cemetery] has five, and Hollywood [Cemetery] has 12.”
Pajka hopes those who purchase her book will use it as a literary travel guide to find the burial sites of well-known authors, as well as those who may have been well known in their day but are now only dimly remembered or practically forgotten.
“I describe the section of the cemetery they’re in and how to find them,” Pajka says. “My book is set up so I provide a very brief bio, the story of their life and their journey as writers. Then I go into specifics about the grave, why it is significant.”
To find information about the women authors she wrote about, Pajka says, her first step was a familiar one: She started with a Google search. She also used ancestry.com and newspapers.com to scour old obituaries, which she found in many instances to be a rich source of information.
But there was also a challenge in old obituaries. Mostly, they contained the women authors’ married names — a common practice for decades —and not their birth names.
“You have to do a lot of detecting,” she says.
The wives and widows of notable Confederates are among the lesser-known women writers Pajka spotlights. Some of these women were largely on their own financially after the Confederacy collapsed or after their husbands died.
Varina Anne Banks Howell Davis, the widow of former Confederate President Jefferson Davis, was one of those women. Besides completing her husband’s memoir, she also wrote columns for the New York World newspaper.
“After she was widowed, Davis moved to New York City with her youngest daughter, Winnie, and continued writing out of necessity,” Pajka writes in her entry on Davis.
She was buried in the Davis family plot in Hollywood Cemetery, along with her husband and children.
Anne Spencer, a poet extraordinaire of the Harlem Renaissance period, is one of Pajka’s favorites because she was both a poet and gardener. Many Black luminaries stayed in Spencer’s home during the period of Jim Crow segregation, when Black travelers were barred from staying at local hotels.
Martin Luther King Jr., Thurgood Marshall, W.E.B. Dubois, George Washington Carver and Langston Hughes were among Spencer’s house guests.
Although Spencer wrote prolifically, only about 30 of her poems were published during her lifetime. Her accomplishments include being the first female African American poet to be included in the “Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry” (1973).
For many modern readers, “Flowers in the Attic” author V.C. Andrews may be one of the most familiar authors mentioned in Pajka’s book.
Her novels, which Pajka describes as including “Gothic horror with family secrets and forbidden love,” have sold many millions of copies.
In Pajka’s book, there is a “not to miss” section for each entry that might include information about other notables buried near the authors or significant landmarks that are close by.
In the “not to miss” section in Andrews’ entry, Pajka notes that 18 miles from the cemetery where Andrews is buried is the statue of Grace Sherwood, known as the last person to have been convicted of witchcraft in Virginia.
“In 2006, Sherwood was exonerated by the governor on the 300th anniversary of her trial,” Pajka writes.
“It is always interesting to find history that wasn’t spotlighted,” Pajka says of the women writers, who often did not receive as much attention as their male counterparts. “This is regional history but also Virginia history and American history.”
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