Mary Virginia Terhune - Biography - Final Years and Death

Final Years and Death

The Terhunes moved to Springfield, Massachusetts after Edward was transferred. They moved again in 1884, to Brooklyn, New York, where Edward successfully revived an ailing parish, at the cost of his own health. He died on May 25, 1907, a year after they celebrated their golden anniversary.

In 1919, Terhune began a new series of articles about her childhood for The Ladies Home Journal. Despite going blind at the age of 90, she continued writing by dictating to a secretary, completing numerous magazine articles and what would be her final novel, The Carringtons of High Hill. She died the following year, on June 2 in her New York home. Her obituary was published in numerous papers.

At the time of her death, she had published twenty-five novels, twenty-five homemaking books, three volumes of short stories, and more than a dozen books on travel, colonial history, and biography, as well as numerous ssays, short stories, and articles for magazines and newspapers. She passed her love of writing on to her surviving children, all of whom became writers. She co-wrote books with each of them: a cookbook with eldest daughter Christine Terhune Herrick, an etiquette book with younger daughter Virginia Van de Water, and a novel with Albert. Albert would become the most noted of her children, with his mother's drive and productivity; he is considered the most prolific author of dog stories known.