Virginian novelist, granddaughter of William Cabell Rives; born in Richmond, VA, on the 23rd of August 1863, and passed her girlhood near Charlottesville, Albemarle County, VA. At an early age she exhibited a passion for art and literature. Her first production was a series of stories entitled A Brother to Dragons (1888), which showed imagination and a sort of untutored strength. This was followed, in the same year, by The Quick or the Dead? which brought the author into prominence as a writer of sensational fiction, “with a tendency to ridiculous extravagance in the representation of passion.“ Her later writings include Virginia of Virginia (1890); Herod and Mariamne, a tragedy in blank verse (1889); The Witness of the Sun (1889); According to St. John (1891); and Athelwold (1893). In 1888 she married John Armstrong Chanler, a descendant of the first J. J. Astor, but they were divorced for incompatibility, and in 1896 she married Pierre Troubetzkoy, the son of a Russian prince.
