Molly Elliot Seawell (1860-1916) was an American writer and scholar of early American history, best known for her regional fiction, romances, and nautical stories for boys. Her strong suit was characterization. "My people usually seem flesh and blood to me. If they do not have the breath of life in them at the beginning, no amount of labor can make them real." Betty's Virginia Christmas is described as "a very pretty, very sentimental little love story with a charming brave-hearted, twenty-year-old coquette for its heroine and a rich and 'dashing young officer' of the United States Army to play the hero" in post-Civil War Virginia.