ABOUT VIRGINIA

Novelist Virginia Rafferty developed a love of the past at an early age. In school she learned about battles, presidents, wars, and explorers. Always, she wondered about the people who lived through tumultuous times. How did they feel? What were their lives like? The immigrant experience fascinated her. Although she taught middle school science in New England, her ancestors did not come to America aboard the Mayflower. They arrived from Hungary and Slovakia and worked in the Pennsylvania coal mines and the factories of Bridgeport Connecticut. Their struggles inspired Rafferty's first  two books, Family Secrets... Hidden in the Shadows of Time and The Road to Lattimer. Readers and reviewers praised both. "Why arn't there more novels like this one?" asked Pennsylvania author P.J. Piccirillo after reading Lattimer. Her recently published novel, The House on Peace Street, tackles even bigger issues: child labor in the mills, the fight by women to vote, the horrors of war, and the 1918 influenza pandemic. In 2007, Rafferty moved to Aiken, S.C., where she joined the South Carolina Writer's Association and Aiken Writers' Bloc. She is a fiction editor for the Northern Appalachia Review.