Anya Seton. The Winthrop Woman. 1958; Chicago: Chicago Review P, 2006. Print.
A recent review mentioned I had received some of my knowledge of English history from Philippa Gregory. Well, this edition of The Winthrop Woman by Anya Seton has an introduction by Ms. Gregory. My parents owned a book or two by Seton, but I never read them. For one thing, as a kid they looked like horror stories featuring women. Yes, they are historical romances, but The Winthrop Woman is not exactly gothic.
Having said that, as a youth I did read things by Anya Seton’s father, Ernest Thompson Seton. Mr. Seton was a nature writer and early supporter of the Boy Scouts. Some Scout books had illustrations by him, and I can still picture his distinctive signature.
We do get a sense of her father’s influence from Anya Seton’s descriptions of North American plants and animal and the herbal remedies our protagonist learned as a girl in her father’s apothecary shop. Seton also presents a sympathetic understanding of the way of life of the Native Americans—a theme in some of her father’s work as well as other things written for Scouts.
Humorist singer-songwriter Tom Lehrer wrote a song about Alma Werfel, a woman who married three famous men in the course of her lifetime: Gustav Mahler, Walter Gropius, and Franz Werfel. The Winthrop Woman tells a similar story of a woman who took part in the early settlement of North America. Her husbands were perhaps not as distinguished as Alma’s, but for someone who left a comfortable life in England to come to the wilds of North America, she was pretty well connected.
Elizabeth “Bess” Fones’ mother was the sister of John Winthrop, the first governor and founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. She marries her first cousin, John’s son Henry. For the rest of her life, her connection to the Winthrop family is both a help and a hindrance. The Winthrops are gentry and entitled to a coat of arms, but not everyone like the Puritans, including the king. King Charles I has a cameo appearance based on an encounter Bess had while a teen.
Bess is from London, but she does spend time at her grandfather and uncle’s estate in Groton. She joins her family members in Massachusetts. Her first husband Henry has worked in Barbados and is looking forward to going to New England, but he dies on the voyage over. Her second husband, a Mr. Feake, is fairly well off but has terrible dreams about something that happened in his past and eventually goes mad. Seton suggests that Feake is never punished for his crime not only because of his insanity but because of his connection to the Winthrops. Bess moves from Boston to Watertown, Massachusetts, and then to Greenwich, Connecticut.
The way Seton tells the story, the English settlers of Greenwich (which borders New York today) wanted to avoid the strictness of the Puritans in Massachusetts and Connecticut, so they successfully petitioned to be included in the colony of New Amsterdam. Bess is able to obtain a divorce in New Amsterdam because of her husband’s insanity and abandonment of her (even from the Dutch it was not easy) and marry Will Hallet, an enterprising farmer and builder. For the purposes of the romance, Hallet was the manliest of the three husbands.
When Greenwich reverts to England by treaty, the Hallets decide to move to Long Island. With stops in Plymouth and New London and stories about New Hampshire, we get a sense of the scope of the early settlements in New England and New York.
Besides John Winthrop and his niece, we meet a number of other historical figures including Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams, Anne Bradstreet, Peter Stuyvesant, John Winthrop the Younger, and King Charles. In the novel, Bess has interactions with all of them.
Anne Hutchinson in particular makes an impression. The Winthrop Woman presents her as a woman who is led by the Holy Spirit but whom envious colony elders persecute. It is safe to assume that some of the more romantic elements of the story are made out of whole cloth—did Bess really like Henry’s brother John, Jr., better? Did Will Hallet carry the torch for Bess for fourteen years? Nevertheless, Seton seems pretty accurate in her portrayal of Mrs. Hutchinson. At one point when doing background research for The Scarlet Letter as I was teaching it, I read the official account of Hutchinson’s trial. To me it was really hairsplitting, but I have seen Christian groups divide rancorously over other seemingly minor points, so it was not a shock. Though Seton’s portrayal of Bess’s own beliefs sound a lot more like liberal twentieth-century Christian theology than anything even Roger Williams would subscribe to, she does illustrate well the issue that was the controversy over Hutchinson: Are believers in a Covenant of Works or a Covenant of Grace?
Both Bess and Anne Hutchinson come across as “strong” women, sympathetic and independent. Seton, though, seems to dismiss poet Anne Bradstreet as a kind of Puritan cipher. I admit being a little surprised at that considering the romantic love poems she wrote about her husband.
It is interesting to note The Scarlet Letter‘s treatment of some of the same historical figures. Hawthorne calls Hutchinson a prophetess and sounds at least as sympathetic to her as Seton. Hawthorne does have a more positive view of Governor Winthrop. In The Scarlet Letter he is honorable, respected, and does not characterize what Hawthorne calls the “sable” aspect of the later Puritans. To Seton he is a stereotyped bigot.
To Seton another bigoted Puritan is the Boston minister John Wilson. The Scarlet Letter describes him as loving, tender, and gracious in contrast to some of the stricter Calvinists in town. Whether reading The Winthrop Woman or The Scarlet Letter, we have to remind ourselves that these works are fiction and the characters fulfill the author’s purposes, not necessarily the historical record.
As mentioned above, Seton presents the Native Americans fairly sympathetically. However, the story tells us things about them noted in other works. Yes, the Europeans often fought one another, but they tended to unite against the Indians. On the other hand, Indians often fought one another, and the Europeans would take advantage of their disunity. The Frontiersmen told of the rise of Tecumseh, the one person who came closest to uniting many of the North American tribes, but he was too little and too late. He tried to exploit the division between the British and Americans after the Revolution, but the British were not the greatest allies. Interestingly, just as that book shared Indian oral history that made it sound like North America was settled by tribal people from Asia relatively recently, so Seton’s Indians say that they have inhabited their part of North America for only about 400 years.
Regardless of the historical quibbles, Seton tells a good tale. Its scope of both people and places impresses the reader of the many challenges the early settlers of North America had to face and overcome. God bless America. Amen.