Santa Rosa resident Sally Watson, prolific author, World War II veteran, dies at 98
Many of the books by Sonoma County author Sally Watson feature heroines much like herself — strong, feisty, independent — and are set in long-ago times and faraway places that Watson studied assiduously and then humanized with characters of her own making.
The historical novelist, who grew up in Seattle and lived the past 35 years in a Santa Rosa cottage graced by cats and books and gardens, drew also from her remarkable life experiences. She served with the Navy WAVES in World War II, she excelled in Scottish Highland dancing, traveled extensively, lived for more than 20 years in England, earned a black belt in judo, became a master gardener and committed to memory vast troves of literature and research.
Watson died at home on March 11. She was 98.
“Mother said I wrote my first book when I was 4,” she told The Press Democrat in 2009. She was 29 when she learned a friend had a story published in a children’s magazine, and she decided on the spot that she, too, could be a writer.
She sat at a typewriter and three weeks later completed the first draft of a book she titled “Highland Rebel.” Set in Scotland in 1745, the story starred a fearless child, Lauren Cameron, who wanted only to be out fighting the British. Watson submitted the manuscript to Henry Holt and Company of New York, which published it early in 1954 without revision.
The author would reflect later, “I was such a novice I didn’t even know this was remarkable luck.”
In writing books, the graduate of Oregon’s Reed College found her bliss.
“She loved words,” said a niece, Karin Glinden of Trinidad, in Humboldt County. “To the very end, she loved them. She loved the sound of them, their history. Their nuances.”
Watson’s first book did well. Suddenly a woman who’d known in her bones that she did not want to become a housewife or an office worker discovered what she did want to do.
She went to work on her second piece of historical fiction, “Mistress Malapert,” about a girl who pretended to be a boy so as to get a job with William Shakespeare at the Globe Theatre. With those first two books, Watson launched the 10-book Family Tree Series, which swept across three centuries and from Great Britain to Northern California.
The writing allowed Watson to blend her love of history, especially that of England, with her fertile imagination and her eagerness for girls and women to resist societal limits and to be bold and self-reliant.
She told The Press Democrat in 2009 that she took great care to assure the historical accuracy of the times in which she placed her fictional characters. “I was always interested in the kind of history they didn’t teach you in school,” she said. “I want to know what people thought and what they wore and what they ate for breakfast.”
Sales of her books in the Family Tree Series allowed Watson to venture forth.
“After three books,” she wrote in an autobiography, “I had enough money to go to Europe for five months. Three more books, and I went back to England for a year and studied Highland dancing and wrote some more books.”
Watson’s curiosity and sense of adventure drew her in 1957 to the young nation of Israel. Her experiences and observations there led her to write three books, starting with “To Build a Land.” It told of children who were made orphans or refugees by World War II and who made a new life together on a kibbutz.
Wrote one reviewer, “Watson tells a hair-raising story of survival while developing some interesting characters and managing to preach tolerance between Jews and Arabs, Jews and Brits, without being preachy.”
Watson also visited Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, in each place meeting people, conducting disciplined research and storing away material for future works.
For a time, Watson lived in Oakland and wrote while also working with her mother, schoolteacher Dorothy Taft Watson, on a groundbreaking audio-visual program that taught children and adults to read through phonics.
In 1964, at age 40, the author found that while her income would not allow her to live independently in the U.S., she could do so in England. She bought and settled into a cottage in Hampshire.
There, she recalled in her memoir, she “joined in MENSA (the England-based international society of people with high IQs) and went on writing books, and took up Judo at age 45.”
Watson’s life changed dramatically in the early 1970s.
“Up until then,” she wrote, “my books were selling slowly but steadily … every time stocks got low, they (the publishers) just printed up a new edition. Now tax laws, it seems, were changed so that it was now uneconomical for publishers to keep books in stock over the turn of the year. So all 12 of my books went out of print almost simultaneously.”
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