American author of best-selling, exhaustively researched, romantic historical and biographical novels.

Seton was the daughter of Ernest Thompson Seton, the English naturalist, writer, and cofounder of the Boy Scouts of America (Boy Scouts), and Grace Gallatin, an American travel writer. She enjoyed a privileged childhood and traveled extensively with her parents. These and later travels were the inspiration for her books, the first of which, My Theodosia (1941), is a novel about the daughter of Aaron Burr (Burr, Aaron).

Seton's gothic romance Dragonwyck (1944) and her novel Foxfire (1950) were adapted for motion pictures. Among her many other novels are The Turquoise (1946), The Hearth and Eagle (1948), Katherine (1954), The Winthrop Woman (1958), and a number of dark romances with English settings, including Devil Water (1962), Avalon (1965), and Green Darkness (1972). Seton also wrote several books for children, including The Mistletoe and Sword: A Story of Roman Britain (1955) and a 1960 biography of Washington Irving (Irving, Washington).