A native of Darien, Connecticut, Scott graduated from Trinity College in Hartford and earned a master's degree from Brown University.
[1] As a student at Darien High School, she encountered the novels of William Faulkner, which she has described as an "unsettling" experience that prompted her first attempts at writing fiction.
[3] After taking a bus trip across the United States,[4] Scott enrolled at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, where she majored in English and studied under the author Stephen Minot.
She then spent a year as an assistant at a literary agency in New York City before enrolling in the Creative Writing Program at Brown University, where she studied with the authors Susan Sontag, Robert Coover, and John Hawkes.
A fragmented, fictional account inspired by the life of Austrian artist Egon Schiele, it was criticized in Publishers Weekly as reading like "an innovative treatise".
[11] Writing in The New York Times, the author Scott Bradfield also classified the work as "more…a treatise than a novel", although he praised its "vivid" use of "sensuous, provocative" material.
[12] However, Entertainment Weekly gave the novel an 'A' grade,[13] and, writing in The Washington Post, J. D. McClatchy called it "a convincing portrait of tortured artistic genius and a dazzling literary performance".
In the Los Angeles Times, Anna Mundow praised the novel's "feverish, hermetically sealed atmosphere", although she criticized its portrayal of its characters.
[15] Calling it "richly atmospheric", Kirkus Reviews declared that the novel "splendidly reinforces Scott's reputation as an original and imaginative writer".
Kirkus Reviews praised its "luminous prose" and "mythic" main character,[20] while Publishers Weekly admired its "retelling of the archetypal American journey from a female perspective".
The scholar Anne-Laure Tissut has characterized Scott's writing as displaying "a fascination for the diversity of the world and an awareness of the wealth of literary devices".
[27] Scott has done this by crafting fictions centered on historical figures ranging from Antonie van Leeuwenhoek to Egon Schiele to her own ancestors.
[28] Critics have also focused on Scott's preoccupation with all facets of creativity, including the psychology of artists, most obviously explored in Arrogance,[14] and the choices made in the process of realizing a personal vision.