Background
Virginia was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1836. She was a descendant of Thomas Townsend who emigrated to Massachusetts from England in the seventeenth century. She was the daughter of James and Hulda (Smith) Townsend of New Haven, Connecticut.
Education
During her childhood she was debarred from active life by frequent illnesses, and as a result found her greatest pleasures in books.
Career
Before she was seventeen she began contributing stories and poems to the ladies' magazines of the time, notably the Ladies' Repository of Cincinnati.
At the age of twenty, in 1856, she became associate editor of the Lady's Home Magazine published by Timothy Shay Arthur. She continued this connection until 1872, supplying the paper regularly with serials, poems, articles, and stories for children, all designed, in accordance with the policy of the magazine, to elevate, inform, and entertain.
Her popularity with the readers of the periodical is attested by the fact that for ten years after she ceased to be named as associate editor, she continued to contribute historical sketches and travel articles.
In 1857 she published her first book, Living and Loving, made up of previously printed stories, and embellished with her portrait engraved by John Sartain. During the next three decades she wrote over a score of popular books for girls. Some of these appeared in the Maidenhood Series, others in the Breakwater Series. Characteristic titles are Amy Deane (1862), Janet Strong (1865), Only Girls (1872), That Queer Girl (1874), Lenox Dare (1881), A Boston Girl's Ambitions (1887). Besides these tales she published three works "out of love and reverence for the past"--The Battlefields of Our Fathers (1864); Life of Washington (1887), "a woman's way of looking at George Washington"; and Our Presidents (1889).
After 1865 she made her home in Massachusetts. In that year she accepted an invitation to act as teacher of rhetoric in the Family School for Young Ladies conducted by Dioclesian Lewis in Lexington, an institution designed to "secure the symmetrical development of body, mind, and heart. " There she enjoyed a pleasant association with girls from many parts of the United States and became increasingly interested in writing books for their entertainment. Some years later, when Dr. and Mrs. Lewis established a sanitarium in Arlington Heights, she became a member of their household. She resided with them until 1881, and afterwards with their successors. She lived a quiet and uneventful life during her later years, reading, walking, writing, and occasionally staying for months in Boston to be near old friends. She died in Arlington and was buried in Mt. Auburn Cemetery.