Helen Hill Miller

Helen Hill Miller (July 29, 1899 – December 26, 1995) was a journalist and author of more than 20 books, but may be best known for her politician spouse and son. She would have become the First Lady of Virginia when her husband Francis Pickens Miller ran (unsuccessfully) in the Democratic primary in 1949 against the Byrd Organization candidate John S. Battle. In 1977, before his father's death, their son Andrew P. Miller, who served two terms as Attorney General of Virginia also lost in the Democratic gubernatorial primary (although his opponent, Henry Howell lost to Republican John N. Dalton).

Early life and education

She was born to the former Lucia Elliott and her husband Russell Hill in Lake Forest, Illinois. She attended Bryn Mawr College and graduated in 1921, then taught at its summer school for Women Workers in 1921, 1923 and 1926. Hill then traveled across the Atlantic Ocean to study in Europe, including at Oxford University (from which she received a diploma in Economics and Political Science in 1922, as well as began the courtship described below). Although Hill continued to travel and study in Europe until 1930, she also attended the University of Chicago and earned her PhD in 1928.

Career

Following their marriage, Miller and her Kentucky-native husband moved to then-rural Fairfax County, Virginia in 1929, buying a 10 acres and reconstructing an old tavern scheduled for demolition on their property, which they operated as a dairy farm and which later became Flint Hill School and still later was acquired by AT&T.

Until 1934, two years after the birth of their second son, Miller was a freelance writer. She then accepted a staff position with the United States Department of Agriculture, across the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., writing articles as well as speeches and press releases intermittently until 1940. When an expected job in Geneva working for the League of Nations failed to materialize, Miller reviewed foreign books for the Saturday Review. In 1938, unemployed in Washington, she published her first book, 'George Mason: Constitutionalist'.

Published works

America's Maginot Lines (No. 9 in America in a World at War series, Farrar, Straus, 1941) Bridge to Asia: the Greeks in the Eastern Mediterranean (New York, Scribner, 1967) Captains from Devon: the Great Elizabethan Seafarers Who Won the Oceans for England (Algonquian Books of Chapel Hill, 1985) The Case for Liberty (University of North Carolina Press, 1965) Colonel Parke of Virginia: the Greatest Hector in the Town (Algonquian Books of Chapel Hill, 1989) Effect of the Bryn Mawr Summer School as measured in the activities of its students (New York Associations, 1929) Foreign Trade and the Worker's Job (World Peace Foundation, 1935) France: Crossroads of a Continent (Foreign Policy Association, 1944) George Mason: Constitutionalist (Harvard University Press, 1938)(also Gloucester Massachusetts, 1966) George Mason: Gentleman Revolutionary (University of North Carolina Press, 1975) George Mason of Gunston Hall (Board of Regents of Gunston Hall, 1958) Greece (Scribner, 1965) Greece Through the Ages: As Seen by Travelers from Herodotus to Byron (New York: Funk & Wagnal, 1972)(also London: Dent, 1972) Greek Horizons (New York: Scribner, 1961) Historic Places Around the Outer Banks (Charlotte: McNally & Loftin, 1975) Kitchen in War Production (Public Affairs Committee, 1943) Passage to America: Raleigh's Colonists Take Ship for Roanoke (Raleigh: America's 400th Anniversary Committee, 1983) Realms of Arthur (New York: Scribner, 1969) also (London: P. Davies, 1970) Sicily and the Western Colonies of Greece (Scribner, 1965) Yours for Tomorrow: A Personal Testament of Freedom (Farrar & Rinehart, 1943)