Anya Seton: A Writing Life, Mackethan Lucinda H.

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 womens suffrage leader who received medals for her volunteer work in France during World War I. The pairs 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 writers 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.