A novel based on the life of Elizabeth Winthrop, who married into the family of Governor John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and moved to the wild New World, is “that rare literary accomplishment—living history [that] gives closer reality to a period than do factual records” (
Chicago Tribune
).
In 1631, Elizabeth Winthrop, newly widowed with an infant daughter, set sail for the New World. Against a background of rigidity and conformity she dared to befriend Anne Hutchinson at the moment of her banishment from the Massachusetts Bay Colony; challenge a determined army captain bent on the massacre of her friends the Siwanoy Indians; and, above all, love a man as her heart and her whole being commanded. And so, as a response to her almost unmatched courage and vitality, Governor John Winthrop came to refer to Elizabeth as his “unregenerate niece” in the historical records of the time. Anya Seton’s riveting historical novel—deemed by
The New York Times
as “abundant and juicy entertainment”—portrays the fortitude, humiliation, and ultimate triumph of a woman who believed in a concept of happiness transcending that of her own day.