Woman of the Century/Margaret Junkin Preston

PRESTON, Mrs. Margaret Junkin, poet, born in Philadelphia, Pa., in 1825. She is a daughter of the late Dr. George Junkin, who at the outbreak of the war was president of Washington College in Lexington, Va. He died in 1868. In her young womanhood she became the wife of Col. Preston, connected with the Virginia Military Institute. She began to write verses when a child. Her first published work appeared in "Sartain's Magazine in 1849 and 1850. In 1856 she published her novel, "Silverwood, a Book of Memories." She sympathized with the South in the Civil War, and many of her fugitive poems, printed before the war in southern journals breathed her spirit of resistance to the North. In 1865 she published a volume of verse, " Beechenbrook." devoted to the Civil War, and containing her "Slain in Battle" and "Stonewall Jackson's Grave," with many other lyrics on the war. In 1870 she published a second volume of verse, "Old Songs and New," which contains the most admirable of her productions. She has contributed art-poems to a number of leading magazines, and her ballads are particularly fine pieces of work. She was one of trie most prominent contributors to the "Southern Literary Messenger." Her attainments are varied, and she has made excellent translations from both ancient and modern languages. Her recent publications are "Cartoons" (Boston, 1875), "For Love's Sake: Poems of Faith and Comfort " (New York, 1886), "Colonial Ballads, Sonnets and Other Verse" (Boston, 1887). "A Handful of Monographs, Continental and Knglish " (New York, 1887).