Virginia Randolph Cary

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Virginia Randolph Cary (30 January 1786–2 May 1852) was the author of Letters on Female Character, Addressed to a Young Lady, on the Death of Her Mother (1828), an influential advice book.

Most likely she was born in Goochland County, Virginia, at Tuckahoe, the plantation of her parents, Thomas Mann Randolph (1741–1794) and his first wife, Ann Cary Randolph. Her twelve sister and brothers included Mary Randolph, author of the influential cookbook The Virginia House-Wife (1824), and Thomas Mann Randolph (1768–1828), who served in the House of Representatives (1803–1807) and as governor of Virginia (1819–1822). After her mother died, she lived in Albemarle County, Virginia, at Monticello with her brother and sister-in-law, the daughter of Thomas Jefferson.

On 28 August 1805 she married her cousin Wilson Jefferson Cary, of Fluvanna County, Virginia. After she was widowed she published four major works:

• Letters on Female Character, Addressed to a Young Lady, on the Death of Her Mother (1828), an advice book
• Mutius: An Historical Sketch of the Fourth Century (1828)
• Christian Parent's Assistant, or Tales, for the Moral and Religious Instruction of Youth (1829)
• Ruth Churchill; or, The True Protestant: A Tale for the Times (1851), a novel

Cary died in Alexandria, Virginia, and is buried in Saint Paul's Episcopal Church Cemetery.

[edit] References

• Cynthia A. Kierner, "'The dark and dense cloud perpetually lowering over us': Gender and the Decline of the Gentry in Postrevolutionary Virginia," Journal of the Early Republic 20 (2000): 185–217.
• Patrick H. Breen, ed., "The Female Antislavery Petition Campaign of 1831–32," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 110 (2002): 377–398.