A Grand Passion

It was in the school library on a somnolent Sydney summer afternoon that I first met her. A passionate, but bookish and rather inarticulate child, I had recently discovered romantic novels and had devoured Daphne du Maurier, Georgette Heyer, Jean Plaidy and Mary Stewart. I loved them all, but meeting Anya Seton’s Katherine, as she set out in that ‘tender green time of April’ on a journey that was to take her from sheltered convent girl to controversial great lady, was the greatest delight of all.

Though Katherine de Roet, later Swynford, was, I was sure, infinitely more beautiful and gifted than me, and though she lived in such a different time and place, I identified with her instantly, and with the book in which she lived and breathed with such intensity. I was just about Katherine’s age – nearly 16 – and I too had spent years in a convent, albeit a convent school. I was itching to go out into the world and, especially, to fall in love. The gap of six hundred years between us seemed meaningless. I was with Katherine every step of the way, from her first introduction to the royal court, where she meets the man who will forever change her life, though she does not yet know it. John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, is the King’s dazzling third son. He and Katherine do not fall in love at first sight, but love is kindled between them, and it becomes a passion as unstoppable as it is overwhelming, one that will bring in its train not just delight, but also murder, madness and exile. Anya Seton’s evocation of that grand passion – particularly in the early stages of the affair, when Katherine and John spend several enchanted days in the remote castle of La Teste, in Les Landes – was so thrilling that I must have worn out those pages rereading them, savouring each time that intoxicating mixture of languor and excitement, sex and romance, poetry and passion. This is not an uncommon reaction; lots of readers, and not only female ones, have felt this way – my husband tells me that as a 15-year-old in England, he read Katherine twice, lingering especially on those passages. Though passionate love forms its incandescent centre, Katherine isn’t just about love, however. It is also an exceptionally rich and detailed evocation of a tumultuous time – the mid- to late fourteenth century, a period dominated by war, the Black Death and the Peasants’ Revolt. In its pages we meet not only Katherine and her royal lover but also a host of exquisitely drawn characters: Katherine’s tormented husband, Sir Hugh Swynford; their daughter Blanchette, who will grow up to condemn her mother; John of Gaunt’s strange little Gascon squire Nirac, who takes it upon himself to perform a terrible service for his beloved master; Katherine’s brother-in-law, Geoffrey Chaucer; John’s lovely, serene first wife Lady Blanche and his odd, spiky second wife, the Castilian princess Costanza; and the English mystic Lady Julian of Norwich, who comforts Katherine in a period of extreme suffering. Reading Katherine not only as an adult but as a writer myself, I am struck by how very good it is. In its evocation of a woman’s emotional, spiritual and intellectual journey, it reminds me of that other magnificent novel of fourteenth-century life, Sigrid Undset’s 1920s trilogy Kristin Lavransdatte. Indeed it is quite possible that Seton was influenced by Undset’s work. But Katherine is also very much its own thing, distinctively beautiful, perfectly pitched, Seton’s masterpiece is one of the great twentieth-century historical novels in English. Back in my teens, after reading Katherine several times, I rushed off to look for other Anya Seton titles. Two especially I still remember with great fondness, and have had much pleasure in rereading: Green Darkness, a part-historical, part-fantasy novel that shuttles between the twentieth and the sixteenth centuries; and Dragonwyck, set in 1840s upstate New York and centred round the haunted New York Dutch family, the Van Ryns, and their mansion, Dragonwyck. Though many of Anya Seton’s other novels are still in print, it is these three that have just been reprinted in beautiful new editions by the Chicago Review Press. I have always been passionate about the novels, but it is only recently that I have learned more about the author herself. Anya Seton’s life was as extraordinary as her fiction. She was born in New York in 1906, the only child of two wealthy, prominent writers, Ernest Thompson Seton and Grace Gallatin, and was christened Ann. Her father had from an early age been fascinated by both the natural world and that of the Native Americans, and as an adult he spent much time living in the wilderness of Manitoba, tracking animals and learning skills from the Cree Indians. He was also a gifted artist and wrote and illustrated several natural history books before, in 1898, publishing the book that made both his fame and his fortune, Wild Animals I Have Known. It has never been out of print. As if that were not enough he was also co-founder of the Boy Scouts of America – an organization from which he resigned in protest against its militaristic stance during the First World War – and subsequently founder of the Woodcraft League, which he set up in opposition to the Scouts, and which was based on a respect for the natural world and for Native American culture and knowledge. Ernest Thompson Seton is still well-known in North America, and there is even an Institute dedicated to him, while his Woodcraft League continues to flourish. His wife Grace, the daughter of a beautiful Californian socialite, wrote several extremely popular travel books, recounting her own adventures in wild and foreign parts. She was also president of the Connecticut Women’s Suffrage League, served two terms as president of the National League of American Pen Women, and commanded a women’s mobile relief unit in France in the First World War. Ann was brought up in the family mansion, under the care of a nanny, and later went to boarding school, but she also travelled a great deal with her parents. She was apparently a hauntingly beautiful and very intelligent child. At 19 she married and ran away to Oxford with her new husband, and it was not until she was in her early thirties, now divorced, remarried, and with three children from those two marriages, that she fulfilled a long-held dream of becoming a writer. As Anya Seton, she published her first novel, My Theodosia, in 1941. The book was an immediate bestseller. Eleven more novels followed, some of which, like Dragonwyck, were made into Hollywood films in the ’40s and ’50s. Her last, Smouldering Fires, was published in 1975, and she died in 1990. I’ve loved all her novels, but it is Katherine especially that lives on in my mind, and in my heart.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 10 © Sophie Masson 2006