From the Shelves of the Paco Library

A little over a decade ago, I exchanged a few letters with Florence King (yes, that Florence King, the well-known essayist). What prompted our brief, but (to me, at least) enjoyable correspondence was an article she had written for, I believe, the National Review, in which she had praised the novels of an author named Anya Seton. Upon Miss King’s recommendation of Seton, I acquired Avalon, and was so impressed by it that I eagerly scooped up everything of Seton’s that I could find. I wrote Miss King a letter expressing my gratitude for having made me aware of Seton’s work, and she wrote me a charming note in return. We wrote to each other a couple of times more, discussing Seton and some other authors (I was also in Miss King’s debt for her having introduced me to Andrew Ferguson’s political essays).

And so I pass on to you my heartiest recommendation of Anya Seton’s novels. My favorites are those books of historical fiction which bear out Seton’s well-earned reputation for exhaustive research, although, naturally, it is her skills of invention, characterization, plotting and just generally fine writing that make the works so thoroughly enthralling. I will touch on one of her novels today.

One thing that stands out about Seton’s novels is the strong female characters who fill the role of the protagonists in her stories. These are not the feminists of Gloria Steinem’s fevered ideology – beings whose superiority is ironically at odds with their “victim” status and whose self-fulfillment is apparently wholly dependent on the police powers of the State - but genuinely intelligent and strong-willed women who, through force of character and determination, carve out a life of independence and, in some case, power in a man’s world. In That Winthrop Woman, Seton treats of a real-life person, Elizabeth Fones, a young woman of 17th-century England, who succumbs to the charms of a wastrel named Harry Winthrop, abandoning her engagement to another man to marry Winthrop, whose profligate ways soon lead to economic ruin. Elizabeth’s father-in-law, John Winthrop, forces the couple to join him in sailing for New England, but Harry drowns before they depart, and Elizabeth, now a widow with child, departs with her cousins for a new life in Massachusetts. The last two-thirds of the book deals with Elizabeth’s subsequent marriages, charges of witchcraft, Indian troubles, and the hard life of pioneering in pre-revolutionary America. Throughout all runs the theme of her rebelliousness against the stern and suffocating society of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and her refusal to be governed by the narrow-minded bigotry of the dour fanatics of the early days of settlement in New England. In her “Author’s Note” Seton writes of the historical Elizabeth:

Elizabeth has thousands of descendants today; many of these – guided by Victorian genealogists and a biased presentation – have a vague feeling that they should be ashamed of her. A member of the Winthrop family, a hundred years ago, even went so far as to mutilate references to her in the original manuscripts. I believe that her life was significant and praiseworthy.

True, she was a rebel against the Puritan code, as exemplified by Governor John Winthrop the elder, who was her uncle, guardian and father-in-law. She was also a woman who suffered the handicaps peculiar to her sex and her time, but she had the remarkable endurance which characterized all the first settlers – those who managed to survive.

Although it is a work of fiction, this book is an accurate and instructive introduction to the formative years of early America, as well as the story of a remarkable woman who never let her misfortunes and the spirit of the times compromise her independence and dignity.