Tag Archives: Anya Seton

Katherine by Anya Seton

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Katherine by the American author Anya Seton was first published in 1954. I’ve been meaning to get around to reading it for years, so I put it on my new third Classics Club list, just to remind me to get on with it. I really enjoyed it.

Katherine is written in six parts which range from 1366 to 1396. At the beginning Katherine is a young girl, leaving the very secluded Sheppey priory that she has grown up in for the hurly burly of Windsor. It’s a long journey and a real eye-opener fot the young girl. It was the Queen who had ordered that Katherine be brought to court, and it’s really only then that Katherine realises that she’s attractive with her long auburn hair. When she’s suffering from the unwanted attention of a man that Katherine first meets, the Duke of Lancaster/John of Gaunt, he saves her from Hugh Swynford, the man that she eventually marries for some sort of security. But it’s the Duke that she’s going to be involved with for most of her life.

This is such an entertaining and painless way of learning about the history of the period, Anya Seton seems really to have done her research into the period, a time of upheaval and misery for the ordinary people, most of whom were serfs, so were not free to move away if they wanted to as the landowner owned them. French wars, plague, rioting, Lollards, Geoffrey Chaucer and all sorts come into the tale, including quite a lot of the old religion as you would expect. But at the heart of it is a three way marriage and I couldn’t help thinking about the Charles/Diana/Camilla episode which was a very similar situation.

Anya Seton was steeped in English history it would seem and was obvioulsy an Anglophile, but there was one very jarring Americanism in that she uses the phrase ‘New Year’s’ It’s a US expression and I always want to say – New Year’s what?! I must say that it drives me nuts so it really jumped out at me. It would never have been used in 14th century England.

Apart from this one I’ve only read her Green Darkness. Would anyone recommend any others by Seton?

The Turquoise by Anya Seton

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The Turquoise cover

I think it took me longer to read The Turquoise by Anya Seton than War and Peace or Wolf Hall, and I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as either of those ones – and it only has 352 pages. For me the first half of this book really dragged, so I only read it at bedtime instead of during the day too as I do with books that I am really engrossed in. The book was first published in 1946.

Doctor Andrew Cameron is an estranged Scot living in New Mexico where he has travelled to after a row with his aristocratic father back in Scotland. He marries a young Spanish woman and has to stand by helpless as she bleeds to death after the birth of their daughter. The Calvinist doctor doesn’t want to call his daughter after a Catholic saint, he comes to a compromise to please his dying wife and calls her Santa Fe after the place they live. He will call her Fey. Seven years later Andrew dies while on a call to help another doctor. It’s a blow to his own patients, but they had grown to love him and one family happily took Fey into their own family, especially as it meant that they took all the doctor’s furniture and belongings too.

When Fey reaches a marriageable age she’s not interested in settling down to the life that the other young women are happy to live, she longs to be rich and have an easy life. But when Terry, a travelling medicine man comes to town she’s captivated by his charm. A quick and possibly illegal marriage follows, but of course Terry isn’t going to hang around long, the pair travel to New York City and in no time Terry has abandoned Fey.

That doesn’t hold Fey back though and she ends up marrying a very rich man, but when Terry appears on the scene again it can only lead to disaster for them all.

The second half of the book was a bit more interesting but it didn’t quite hit the spot for me anyway, despite plenty of references to Scotland and Fey’s inherited Highland ‘second sight’. Fey isn’t a very likeable character so that was a problem for me.

I still have Anya Seton’s Katherine to read, I hope it’s more enjoyable than this one. I must say though that the author was good at Scots dialect dialogue, I wonder if she got soneone else to write those parts for her. Seton is of course a Scottish surname so possibly there was Scots blood somewhere in her background.

Have you read any of her books?

Green Darkness by Anya Seton

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Anya Seton‘s note at the beginning of this book states that The theme of this book is reincarnation, an attempt to show the interplay – the law of cause and effect, good and evil – for certain individual souls in two English periods.

The two periods are 1968 when the book begins but after 80 odd pages the story turns back to Tudor times. Celia Marsden is a young, rich American who has been married for her money really, her husband Richard’s family has lived in a Sussex manor house, Medfield Place since the Tudor times, and before that they had built a stone keep there in the 1200s.

In 1968 Celia ends up in a catatonic state and it’s then that the story switches to Tudor times with many of the same characters from 1968. It isn’t exactly successful although I can imagine that if I had read this book when it was first published in 1972 when I was 13 then I would have probably loved it. Of course it could just be that I was put off by yet another Tudor period setting which I hadn’t expected. Back in 1972 this book was wildly popular and I almost never read books at the same time as everybody else is reading them. I don’t know why – it’s probably me being a wee bit snobbish book-wise. Has anyone read Anya Seton’s Katherine and if so should I read it do you think?

A Book Buying Weekend

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I know I’m supposed to be on a book buying ban until I make a big dent in my TBR pile, but when I went into that bookshop in Callander on Saturday I came across an old copy of an E.M. Delafield so of course the ban went straight out of the window. I didn’t even know that there was a sequel to The Diary of a Provincial Lady, but there is and I have it – The Provincial Lady Goes Further. It was first published in 1932 but mine is a 1942 reprint and it has nice clear print. The chap in the bookshop (see photo on previous post) thought that he had THREE books by Angela Thirkell, then he discovered that they had been sold. What a disappointment!

On Sunday I went to a branch of The Works. I was looking for Mary Stewart’s The Ivy Tree but they didn’t have it. They had The Gabriel Hounds but I read that one years ago so I didn’t bother buying it. I’m feeling quite virtuous about that.

Green Darkness cover
The Secrets of the Chess Machine cover

However, not very virtuous because they did have a copy of Green Darkness by Anya Seton and I bought that. I’m fairly sure that I haven’t read that one. I did read and enjoy Katherine – way back in the year dot, and I know I can borrow that one from my local library if I want to read it again. Green Darkness was first published in 1972 so I don’t know how I missed it.

I also bought The Secrets of the Chess Machine by Robert Lohr, a German author, and it’s based on the true story of a legendary invention. It’s set in Vienna in 1770. I like silhouettes so I was attracted by the cover of this book, also the fact that it had a 49p sticker on it! Well if it turns out to be a duffer I haven’t wasted much money.

My husband bought The Infinities by John Banville and Songs of the Dying Earth which is edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois. It’s a book of short stories by various science fiction writers in honour of Jack Vance.

And a book which we’ll both read is Maritime Scotland by Brian Lavery. This isn’t the cover of the one which we bought, ours has lovely sailing ships and a very grand looking building on it, unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any mention of the painting which was used for the cover either.
Maritime Scotland cover
That is how the TBR pile grows faster than I can read them! Has anyone read any of these books?