The lives of the puritans of the time was while on the one hand full of hypocrisy, on the other, their devotion to their god was also very real and what they truly thought he wanted of them. While this is not the best book I’ve ever read it definitely was interesting and insightful. But once I was a couple hours in I found myself wanting to hear more. The book started very slowly for me and I probably would’ve returned it if it hadn’t been for my connection to the family and pure interest in the workings (even though this is fiction) of their lives.
I, like a lot of people who find our way to this book and read it, can trace my ancestry back to the Winthrop family. The fact that as a woman of the time, she was visible and vocal enough that her name was written down and her life remembered at all, makes this book worth reading. The mere fact that she survived and thrived an adventure that most who attempted it did not, makes her worthy of remembering. Elizabeth Winthrop lived and survived in a critical period of history. This is what elevated my overall rating of the book. We will never know how accurate her interpretation of the man was, but by making him more human, it mad me more curious to learn more of the truth about the man. She made a man historically portrayed as cold and unlikeable, into a man with flaws who constantly doubted himself and struggled to live the life he preached. She breathed life and sympathy into historical figures that are typically seen as caricatures or cardboard cutouts of real people. But she then added layers of facts about the time Elizabeth lived and the larger than life historical figures she knew and created a strong work of historical fiction. If that is all it was, I would say this was an adequate book.
Seton took the few facts at hand and built a readable romance novel. These set her apart from the thousands of faceless women who lived her same life. But somehow, in a time when women were definitely "background" and men made history, there are a few incidences in her life that stood out at the time and have survived. In many ways she was a "nobody" and the details of their lives seldom survive. While Elizabeth actually existed, and due to her relationship to John Winthrop whose life was well documented, we know many of the "facts" of her life - her parentage, her move to the new world, her marriages - we don't have the knowledge of the details of her life like we do Elizabeth I or Marie Antoinette. The Winthrop woman tells the story of Elizabeth Winthrop, the daughter-in-law/niece of John Winthrop, a strict Puritan and a founding governor of the Massachusetts Colony in the first half of the 17th Century. I listened to Katherine several years back and became impressed with Ms.
I read Green Darkness many years ago and it remains one of my all time favorites, in my favorite genre.
Anya Seton's historical fiction seems to age very well.
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