Franklin Gould

Married to the world-famous Victorian artist George Frederic Watts, Mary was a suffragist and designer with a curious artistic interest in Death. As creator of the Watts Mortuary Chapel, she was a pioneer of the Celtic Revival, who elevated the status of craftswomen on both sides of the Atlantic.

In this first biography to focus exclusively on Mary’s life before marriage, Valiant Seton examines the pivotal role her Fraser Tytler ancestors played in Scotland’s literary heritage, her upbringing in a remote highland castle, the flamboyance of her decorative art and her entry into the epicentre of the English artworld. A disastrous love affair in Rome tormented the young artist for years, punctuating her march into the heart of her ’painter of painters.’

Valiant Seton is a compelling account of Mary’s turbulent life and her emergence from her aristocratic chrysalis into a social reforming craftswoman and life-partner extraordinaire of England’s Michelangelo.