Her religious faith is thin and, unlike her beloved mother-in-law, Margaret, she is unable to turn to the Bible to find comfort and submission. She feels traumatized forever over the whipping she received at the hand of John Winthrop as a child, and experiences the constraints of the intensive male oppression of the times in which she lived. Bess was too much a free spirit for John's liking, and it fell to him to arrange her marriages and protect her, being her uncle and also father, by marriage.Įlizabeth longs for freedom and autonomy. He whipped Bess in front of the entire family for a childish act of deception and later resented her marrying his son, her first cousin. His relationship with his niece, Bess, was tenuous.
His task was huge and daunting, and he became quite cruel and radical. Winthrop became the first governor of the New Plymouth colony in America., and dominated his people with harsh puritanical religion and punishment. "Abundant and juicy entertainment.The Winthrop Woman is Anya Seton's story of Elizabeth, or "Bess" Fones, who is a niece of the venerable John Winthrop. "Abundant and juicy entertainment."- New York Times
It is bound to give much enjoyment and a good many thrills."- Times Literary Supplement (UK) "A rich and panoramic narrative full of gusto, sentimentality and compassion. Really good fictionalized history often gives closer reality to a period than do factual records."- Chicago Tribune " The Winthrop Woman is that rare literary accomplishment-living history. And so, as a response to this almost unmatched courage and vitality, Governor John Winthrop came to refer to this woman in the historical records of the time as his "unregenerate niece."Īnya Seton's riveting historical novel portrays the fortitude, humiliation, and ultimate triumph of the Winthrop woman, who believed in a concept of happiness transcending that of her own day. Against a background of rigidity and conformity she dared to befriend Anne Hutchinson at the moment of her banishment from the Massachusetts Bay Colony dared to challenge a determined army captain bent on the massacre of her friends the Siwanoy Indians and, above all, dared to love a man as her heart and her whole being commanded. In 1631 Elizabeth Winthrop, newly widowed with an infant daughter, set sail for the New World. Colonial America holds friendship, hardship, and love for a bold woman in this classic historical romance from the bestselling author of Green Darkness.
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