Anya Seton
A Writing Life
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- £11.99
Publisher Description
Anya Seton was the bestselling author of ten historical novels, including the masterpieces Katherine and The Winthrop Woman, which are still widely beloved over sixty years after their original publication. Yet there has never before been a book-length biography of this great American writer. Author Lucinda MacKethan, with the support of Seton's daughters and unprecedented access to the novelist's decades' worth of journals detailing her writing throughout her career, has crafted an intimate look at the writer in her own words.
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 volunteer work in France during World War I. The pair's literary output gave them enduring fame, but 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 thirty-six 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 the heroines" of her books. She reinvented herself within carefully researched historical settings and biographical frameworks that provided both escape and wish fulfillment.
Through Seton's own journal entries, letters, and self-analyses, MacKethan provides an intimate study of what it meant to her to be a writer. She details Seton's creative process, as well as the difficulties she faced balancing writing with the duties of homemaking and raising three children, and the gratitude or more often frustration she felt 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
MacKethan (The Dream of Arcady), an English professor emeritus at North Carolina State University, offers a decent, if not revelatory, first book-length biography of mid-century historical fiction writer Anya Seton (1904 1990).MacKethan offers background on Seton's parents, especially her father, prominent nature writer Ernest Thompson Seton, then traces how Seton, an only child, grew up in privileged circumstances in Greenwich, Conn. In 1941, Seton rose to prominence with the release of her debut, My Theodosia, and remained a bestselling author for the rest of her working life, up until the mid-1970s. The biography notes Seton's strong reliance on research in her 10 novels and her dedication to her work, while also chronicling her slow decline into alcoholism and barbiturate dependency. MacKethan, though heavily reliant on Seton's extensive journals, seems detached from her subject. She concentrates on summarizing life events and plots of novels, and does attempt some analysis of Seton and her work through the lens of her troubled relationship with her father. However, the author's personality remains opaque, to the extent that it is a revelation at the end to hear editor Paul Brooks refer to this self-doubting figure as a "prima donna." Nonetheless, MacKethan has performed a valuable service in this take on a once-popular, and now comparatively little-read, author. The author's fans will appreciate this workmanlike volume as a worthwhile attempt at illuminating an underrated writer's life and career.
