Julia Magruder

Julia Magruder (1854–1907) was an American novelist, born in Charlottesville, Virginia, who moved to Washington, D.C. as a small child and lived largely there. She published sixteen novels along with short stories and essays on social questions, many of them serialized in the Ladies' Home Journal, and most built on a heroine facing obstacles on her way to love. In her essays she often defended southern culture against northern critics while arguing for reconciliation between the two regions. About a year before she died, the French government nominated her for the Ordre des Palmes Académiques, an honor rarely given to Americans; the decoration reached her a week before her death in 1907.