VICTOR, Mrs. Frances Fuller, author, born in Rome. N. Y., 23rd May, 1826. Her maiden name was Fuller. Her father was of an old
Colonial family, some of whom were among the
FRANCES FULLER VICTOR.
founders of Plymouth. She has on her mother's side a long line of titled and distinguished ancestry, descending through thirty-nine generations from Egbert, the first king of all England. The last titled representative of this line was Lady Susan Clinton, the wife of General John Humfrey, deputy-governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company, chartered in 1628 by Charles I. Lady Susan's granddaughter married Captain Samuel Avery, of New London, Conn., and their daughter, Mary, married William Walworth, of Groton, who was a descendant of the William Walworth, Lord Mayor of London, who was knighted by Richard II for slaying Wat Tyler in defense of the king. This English ancestry became mixed with the sturdy Welsh blood of the Williamses, the founders of liberty on this continent. Mrs. Victor's mother was Lucy Williams, her grandmother a Mary Stark, of the race of General Stark, and her great-grandmother, Lucy Walworth, a granddaughter of William Walworth and a cousin of Chancellor Walworth, the last chancellor of New York. When Frances was nine years of age, she wrote verses on her slate in school, and arranged plays from her imagination, assigning the parts to her mates, to whom she explained the signification. At the age of fourteen she published verses which received favorable comment, and at the age of eighteen some of her poems were copied in English journals. At that time the family were living in Ohio, to which State her parents had removed, and it was a familiar boast of the Ohio press that the State had two pairs of poet sisters, the Carys and the Fullers. Frances and her sister Metta married brothers. The younger sister remained in the East, settling in the vicinity of New York City, and Frances followed her husband, then an officer in the naval service of the United States, to California. At the close of the Civil War he resigned and went to settle in Oregon. In that new world she began to study with enthusiasm the country and its history from every point of view. She wrote stories, poems and essays for California publications, which, if collected, would make several volumes. After the death of her husband, in 1875, she returned to California and assisted Mr. H. H. Bancroft on his series of Pacific histories, writing in all six volumes of that work, on which she was engaged for about eleven years. Subsequently she resumed book-making on her own account. Besides the great amount of literary work done by Mrs. Victor which has never been collected, she has published "Poems of Sentiment and Imagination" (New York, 1851); "The River of the West" (Hartford, 1870); "The New Penelope, and other Stories and Poems" (San Francisco, 1876); "All Over Oregon and Washington" (San Francisco, 1872), and "Atlantes Arisen" (Philadelphia, 1891), all of which, excepting the first volume of poems, deal with the history and the romance of the Northwest. Her home is in Portland, Ore.