Lucinda Hardwick MacKethan - Anya Seton: A Writing Life

BEGINNING WIT H HER FIRST book, My Theodosia (1941), Anya Seton included an authors note, preface, or afterword in almost all her novels. She wanted everyone to know, as she said in her first note, that I have tried to be historically accurate in every detail. No matter how we might regard that self-assessment, it is true that Anyas attention to historical authenticity has always been the most highly praised feature of her novels.

In the following pages, I hope to present accurately the story of the writing life of one of the twentieth centurys most popular historical novelists. The task has helped me to understand why authors notes were such a necessary indulgence for Anya Seton because I too feel the need to emphasize, as she did, where all the facts of this story have come from. And theres the rub. Anya Seton was the daughter of two writers who together with her constitute a family of prodigious talent, great passion, enormous charm, and fierce egotism. The SetonsErnest Thompson, Grace Gallatin, and Anyaleft a print record of themselves not only in their books (over forty for Ernest, seven for Grace, and thirteen for Anya) but in letters, journals, magazine pieces, and newspaper articles. In the authors note to My Theodosia, Anya spoke of the vast amount of Burr material that she had to absorb. As her biographer, I sympathize. The story of her writing family extends from Ernest Thompsons first story, Lobo, King of the Currumpaw (1894) to Anyas last novel, Smouldering Fires (1975). Then it extends far beyond to include the scholars, critics, and reviewers as well as the generations of readers who have continued to treasure Seton books, especially Anyas, long after their deaths.

As far as biographical or critical studies, the story is different. There are no book-length biographies of Anya or Grace, while there are three of Ernest Thompson Seton. As for Anya Seton, few who have studied the fate of popular women authors writing during the mid-twentieth century find the lack of scholarly attention surprising. Despite or because of her presence on the New York bestseller lists for over thirty years, she never had much chance for literary scrutiny. With the tags Money Writer and Historical Romancer all but stamped on her forehead, she easily disappeared from critical view, especially because she wrote during a time when women writers were often consigned to the categories of romance or bodice rippers or, at best, fiction targeted for the light entertainment of housewives. From the 1940s to the 1970s, the period when Anya had a wide readership, women writers of great popular appeal generally encountered the disdain of highbrow reviewers and academic arbiters of literary taste.

The climate has changed. One of the interesting things about many currently well-regarded historical novelists (Alison Weir, Philippa Gregory, Florence King, Sharon Kay Penman, and Mary Higgins Clark, to name a few) is how enthusiastically they cite Anya Seton as a formative influence. A look online shows that readers are often sharing their joy at discovering, or rediscovering, her adult novels. Those ten remain available in several editions and languages.

For me, the saga of critical reception is not what is most important to address, except as Anya herself expressed her feelings about it. So little is known about her actual life, especially what she called her writing life, and so much material about that life has been made available to me, that tracing its history has become my calling.

Thanks to the generosity of Anyas daughters, Pamela Cottier Forcey and Clemency Chase Coggins, the Greenwich Historical Society contains enough Anya Seton files to make a researcher feel that no one in the family ever threw away anything. If it related to their writing, their interchanges with one another, their finances, or their publicity, they saved it, and most of it came down to Anyas and then her daughters keeping.

There are also collections at the National Archives of Canada, the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and the Ernest Thompson Seton Library at the Philmont Scout Ranch in Cimarron, New Mexico. Important additional materials for Grace Gallatin Seton are available at the Schlesinger Library of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. The valuable files pertaining to Anya and her publishers are housed in the Houghton Mifflin records in the Houghton Library at Harvard. I have been to all these places, an adventure that for me has echoes of the journey that Grace recorded in the subtitle to one of her travel narratives: A half-year in the wilds of Mato Grosso and the Paraguayan forest, over the Andes to Peru, except that Grace had better scenery, and her trek took her only half a year, while mine has taken many years more.

All the collections contain rich evidence of how the Setons lived, wrote, and related to one another. One of my greatest difficulties has been the problem of how to keep Ann, then Anya, at the center of focus when her parents accomplishments keep clamoring to be included. I have not given them the space that many might wish. I can blame the mountains of sources, but also remind myself of what Ann wrote when she had barely begun to be interested in writingshe wanted to be recognized for herself and aimed even more audaciously to be more popular than her parents. Thats her story, and Im trying to stick to it while also presenting her very close relationships to her parents and their influence on her personally and professionally.

Next came the question of how best to capture the different sides of what Anya called her bifurcated, trifurcated life, one in which, as she put it, I try to ride too many horses. My decision has been influenced by the place from which we hear Anyas own voice most clearlyfrom what might be called her own autobiography. At age seventeen she started writing what she called her personal little book, what would eventually become over three thousand handwritten pages of journals, most of them filling ten three-hundred-page, leather-bound, red-spined, eight-by-eleven-inch, lined ledger notebooks.