Search results for ""Author Lucinda H. MacKethan""

Anya Seton was the bestselling author of ten historical novels, including the masterpieces Katherine and The Winthrop Woman, which are still widely beloved over sixty years after their original publication. Yet there has never before been a book-length biography of this great American writer. Author Lucinda MacKethan, with the support of Seton’s daughters and unprecedented access to the novelist’s decades’ worth of journals detailing her writing throughout her career, has crafted an intimate look at the writer in her own words. 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 women’s suffrage leader who received medals for her volunteer work in France during World War I. The pair’s 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 writer’s 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. Through Seton’s own journal entries, letters, and self-analyses, MacKethan provides an intimate study of what it meant to her to be a writer. She details Seton’s creative process, as well as the difficulties she faced balancing writing with the duties of homemaking and raising three children, and the gratitude or more often frustration she felt toward editors and reviewers. A compelling portrait emerges of a deeply dedicated writer whose life was full of inner turmoil, most of it self-inflicted.

Read more less

Recollections of a Southern Daughter recalls life in antebellum Liberty County, Georgia, a time and place best known today through the letters of the Charles Colcock Jones family, published in the classic Children of Pride, and the letters and journals of the Roswell King, Fanny Kemble, and Joseph LeConte families. In this memoir Cornelia Jones Pond gives an eyewitness account of how the privileged life of the southern slaveholding class was destroyed by a whirlwind of change. Pond's narrative begins in 1834, when she was born to one of the Old South's wealthiest plantation families. It ends in 1875, when she was a forty-one-year-old minister's wife and the mother of four daughters, trying to make her way in the drastically changed post-Civil War South. She began dictating her memoir to her daughter Anne in 1899, when she was sixty-five years old, and the handwritten manuscript eventually found its way to the Midway Church Museum. This is the first unabridged edition of Pond's memoir, and it includes notes, genealogy, and an extensive intoduction by Lucinda H. MacKethan. In Recollections of a Southern Daughter Pond renders with striking immediacy and affectionate detail not only her personal past but also the tremendous upheaveals of history that she witnessed firsthand. Many of the experiences recorded here parallel those depicted in Children of Pride, thus extending our knowledge of the people of this region, their values, their everyday concerns, and the national drama that engulfed their families in the years of civil war.

Read more less