Virginie Sampeur, the first Haitian woman writer, is born

Marie Angelique Virginie Sampeur was born in Port-au-Prince on 28 March 1839. She trained as a teacher, read in several languages, and was writing verse by seventeen. At twenty-three, in 1862, she married the poet Oswald Durand; nine years later the marriage ended. Out of that came L’Abandonnee, her best-known poem and a flat account of betrayal. Her work appeared in La Ronde and in Haiti litteraire et scientifique, and she is credited as the first Haitian woman writer to be published. She died in June 1919.