Professor Marc Arkin wrote a review of a new biography of Elizabeth Ann Seton for the Wall Street Journal.
Ms. O’Donnell’s story encompasses a cast of characters worthy of a Russian novel; readers may be forgiven for wanting a Seton-Bayley family tree as well as a separate table of names. For the secularly inclined, the number of extended deathbed scenes—albeit standing in a long religious tradition of edifying deaths—may verge on the morbid. And, to this reader at least, the book does not do justice to the charm and humor that formed a central element in Mother Seton’s charisma. But these are mere cavils weighed against a remarkable biography of a remarkable woman.