Anya Seton: A Writing Life

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 publication; yet there has never before been a book-length biography about this great American writer.



Ann Seton was born in 1904 the daughter of two celebrity writers: Ernest Thompson Seton and Grace Gallatin Seton. 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 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 wrote probably her own best epitaph while working on her masterpiece, Katherine: "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."