Virginia Dare: A Romance of the Sixteenth Century

America's first great mystery begins with a child. Virginia Dare, born August 1587 to Eleanor Dare in the short-lived Roanoke Colony, was the first English child born in the New World, and this novel uses that fact to devastating effect. It is the origin story of a nation told through one family's fragile hope. The narrative follows the desperate struggle of early settlers to survive in a hostile wilderness, their fraught encounters with native peoples, and the aching bond between mother and child. Then the colony vanishes, and what remains is the question that has haunted America for four centuries. Written in 1892 with full Romantic-era ardor, the prose glows with Victorian reverence for the colonial past. This is historical fiction as elegy, capturing that strange summer when England's first New World experiment ended in silence. Readers who love America's origin myths, the Lost Colony, or stories about what disappears will find something here that no textbook can offer.