Anya Seton: A Writing Life

Anya Seton was the bestselling author of 10 historical novels, including the masterpieces Katherine and The Winthrop Woman, which are still widely beloved over 60 years after their original publication. Yet there has never before been a book-length biography of this great American writer. Ann Seton was born in 1904 the daughter of two celebrity writers: Ernest Thompson Seton, a renowned naturalist and illustrator, and Grace Gallatin Seton, a women's suffrage leader who received medals for her service in France during World War I. The pair's literary output gave them enduring fame. As a teenager, Ann explicitly rejected her parents' careers because, she said, they showed her the drudgery of a writer's life. Still, she was always confident that she had inherited her parents' talent. At age 36 and self-renamed Anya, she placed her first novel with a major publisher. Anya the author was protective of her private life yet also mused, “I suppose I write myself over and over again in my heroines.” She reinvented herself within carefully researched historical settings and biographical materials that provided both escape and wish-fulfillment. In journal entries, letters, and “self-analyses,” she provides an intimate study of what it meant to her to be a writer. She describes her creative process along with the difficulties of balancing writing with th duties of homemaking and raising three children, and she expresses her gratitude or more often frustration toward editors and reviewers. A compelling portrait emerges of a deeply dedicated writer whose life was full of inner turmoil, most of it self-inflicted. She wrote probably her own best epitaph while working on her masterpiece, Katherine, published in 1954: “My forte is story, and a peculiarly meticulous (fearful, yes) desire to weave historical fact into story. Make history come alive and as exciting as the past is to me.”