As she relates in her autobiography, The Trees and Fields Went the Other Way (1974), Evelyn Sybil Mary Eaton led a colorful and adventurous life. She was born in Switzerland to Canadian parents; after her father was killed during the First World War, the family moved to England, where Evelyn enrolled at Heathfield School in Ascot. She later studied at the Sorbonne in Paris. A brief romance with a married University of London court clerk produced her only child, and with a baby to support, Evelyn turned to serious writing. In 1940, the publication of Quietly My Captain Waits, a novel set in Acadia during the early days of New France, brought her commercial success. A series of books set in New France would follow. Evelyn also wrote book reviews for The Saturday Review, became a regular contributor to The New Yorker and, at the end of the Second World War, was selected to tour Europe, Burma, India, and China as a correspondent reporting on the theaters of war. She became an American citizen in 1945, after which she secured a teaching appointment at Columbia University (1949–1951), a Visiting Lectureship at Sweet Briar College (1951–1960), and a position as Writer in Residence with the Huntingdon Hartford Foundation (1960 and 1962). During this time she also worked in radio and television broadcasting.
Evelyn had a lifelong feeling that she had a Native American ancestry, and in the 1950s she began to she began to study Native American religions. The result was a series of short stories published in The New Yorker, four novels, a volume of poetry, and a ballet-oratorio—all based on First Nation spiritual practices. She owned a home in Lone Pine, Calif., and died in Independence in 1983.
The Wolff Library contains a copy of Quietly My Captain Waits as well as the The King Is a Witch, both tomes presumably gifted by Ms. Eaton. In the letter here (simply dated “June 29”), Ms. Eaton asks Wolff for a loan to buy a piece of property from one of his students. She also notes that “we are not quite out of the woods with the BLM [Bureau of Land Management] yet.” (2 pages)
