Elizabeth Seton
American Saint
by Catherine O’Donnell
Cornell, 508 pp., $36.95
In a damp, cold quarantine station in Italy, a woman nurses her dying husband. The year is 1803, and the woman, 29-year-old Elizabeth Ann Seton, struggles to pray. “My eyes smart so much with crying, wind and fatigue that I must close them and lift up my heart,” she writes in her journal. The family’s voyage from their home in New York, meant to relieve William Seton’s tuberculosis, has only brought him to death’s door. As their young daughter looks on, Elizabeth spends “the night listening for her husband’s breath and ‘kiss[ing] his poor face to feel if it [is] cold.’” Finally, William, after whispering “May Christ Jesus have mercy and receive me,” draws his last breath. Nine years after she married the man she called her “beloved treasure,” Elizabeth faces financial ruin, the rearing of five fatherless children—and religious uncertainty.
