THE WINTHROP WOMAN

by Anya Seton ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 17, 1957

Not since Rachel Field's All This And Heaven Too have we had a novel with this particular quality:- a story rooted in fact, authentic as to historical and regional and period background, and yet deeply emotional in the handling of a marriage (or in this case marriages) which presents its own peculiar problems. Once more a demonstration of the old truism- ""Truth is stranger than fiction"". Elizabeth Winthrop, niece (and for a time daughter-in-law) of the stern, inflexible governor of the Bay Colony, John Winthrop, was a rebel from her childhood. Her life, as it developed its strangely contradictory pattern with its loves, its hates, its tragedies, its drama, makes absorbing reading. Though told as a novel, it is authentic history, and makes the years of the founding of New England come alive, no more the colorless, staid, unimpassioned picture our early school histories have made it. All of the key people are here, real in their passions and fears, their ambitions and aspirations. We learn that their English backgrounds played an important part in their New England struggles -- in the intolerances, the conflicts, the battle for power. The story -- though it revolves around Elizabeth and her three marriages -- conveys the whole panorama of these years; and in the period when she and her tragic second husband, Feake, took oath under the government of New Amsterdam, the history of the early struggle for survival in Greenwich, then Dutch territory, there is much that will be wholly new in the story of New England, to most readers. An absorbing story, in which the happenings grow out of the characters- all too rare an attribute when the author is bound by integrity to historical fact. The publisher count this their lead novel of the new list. It has the makings of a novel of permanent worth.

Pub Date: Jan. 17, 1957

ISBN: 155652644X

Page Count: -

Publisher: Houghton, Mifflin

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1957

Categories: FICTION