Featured on PDR in the collection Old French Fairytales, illustrated by Virginia Frances Sterrett (1920)
In 1920, at the tender age of 19, Chicago-born artist Virginia Frances Sterrett received her first commission from The Penn Publishing Company to illustrate Old French Fairy Tales — a collection of works from the nineteenth-century French author, Comtesse de Ségur (Sophie Fedorovna Rostopchine). Shortly after completing the work Sterrett was diagnosed with tuberculosis. She would manage a few other commissions, including illustrations for Nathaniel Hawthorne's Tanglewood Tales the following year, and for a 1928 edition of Arabian Nights, but her failing health meant she could only work in short bursts. She eventually passed away in 1931, at the age of 30.