As a 10-year-old in Versailles, Kentucky, she wrote a series of charming essays that were kept in a scrapbook by her mother, Jessie Gregory Hudson.
Her daughter Virginia Cleveland Mayne copied the essays in the spring of 1952 before a disastrous attic fire destroyed the originals in October 1952.
Her father, Richard N. Hudson, President of the Louisville, Henderson & St. Louis Railway, built a country home near there overlooking the Ohio river.
Kirtley was an owner and trainer of thoroughbred horses, and Virginia traveled with him to racetracks in North America, Cuba, and Mexico.
At home, Hudson was a feisty president of the St. James Court Association who solved the problem of people parking on the center green by letting the air out of their tires in the dead of night.
The essays she had written when she was ten years old were published by Virginia Cleveland Mayne as O Ye Jigs & Juleps!
A Swiss German translation as Respektlose Betrachtungen eines aufgeweckten Kleinstadtmädchens aus dem Amerika der Jahrhundertwende was published in 1968, and a Dutch edition, O gij polka's en perendrups in 1963.
The title of the book is inspired by a traditional canticle, sung in English in Episcopal worship, the Benedicite omnia opera Domini.
Hudson's daughter published three more books of her mother's writings: Credos & Quips (1964), held by 313 libraries worldwide; Flapdoodle, Trust & Obey (1966), a collection of Virginia's letters, held by 439 libraries worldwide; and Close Your Eyes When Praying (1968), lessons about the Bible and the people in it, from a woman's point of view.