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The Significance. Ten months ago saw the publication of Elizabeth and Essex by Lytton Strachey (TIME, Dec. 31). Katherine Anthony's picture of Elizabeth is more complete, and she is naturally able to write as one woman of another. Perhaps it is this sex sympathy which has enabled her to untie many heretofore tightly tangled Elizabethan knots. Embracing the political implications of the virgin's reign — the development of England's insularity, the alienation of the continent—she fails however to suggest as strongly as did Strachey the lusty temper of the times, the era gorgeous with talent, studded with awesome genius. But she establishes herself again as an acute, comprehensive, sometimes vivid biographer, well-equipped to develop her summary of Elizabeth—"Her reign was a marriage, and the nation was her child."
The Author. In 1920 Katherine Anthony wrote her "psychological biography" of Margaret Fuller, in 1925 her intimate account of Catherine the Great. When she heard Queen Elizabeth's first five chapters had pleased Literary Guild Editor Carl Van Doren, Author Anthony forwarded three chapters at a time, as written, to Publisher Knopf. She refused to hurry, Guild or no Guild. Born in Arkansas, she attended Peabody College of Teachers in Nashville, Tenn., studied in Chicago, Heidelberg, Freiberg. A brown-haired, blue-eyed, middle-aged feminist, she has gone to Russia or to England, as the case may be, to collect her biographical materials. But she writes in her farmhouse in Brookville, Conn.