Raised on a large plantation, her education included being "turned loose in a library of good books", her father's home containing the best literature of the 18th century.

She described her early formation as a "... secluded life ... in the library of an old Virginia country house, and in a community where conditions more nearly resembled the eighteenth than the nineteenth century" ("The Ladies' Battle", 116).

Apparently the appeal of Russia and Germany was the therapeutic waters of the baths, to which Seawell attributed the improvement of a chronic eye condition (Notman "Some Authors," "Talks").

The household Seawell sustained with her mother and her younger sister Henrietta on P Street near Washington's fashionable Du Pont Circle was the location of an artists' salon of sorts.

She entertained artists and writers there in addition to such notables of the time as the Earl of Carlisle and his daughter, Lady Dorothy Howard (Notman "Some Authors," "Talks").

After the death of her mother and later of Henrietta, Seawell temporarily withdrew from social life, despite an enormous capacity for friendship and interest in people.

The death of her father when she was 20 (Notman "Talks" 392) prompted Molly Elliot Seawell, her mother and her younger sister, Henrietta, to move from "The Shelter" in Gloucester to Norfolk and later to Washington, D.C.

She first wrote using pseudonyms (including the patrician-sounding "Foxcroft Davis" – the novels Mrs. Darrell and The Whirl – and the Russian "Vera Sapoukhyn") until the publication of her short story Maid Marian in 1886, a tale she later dramatized for actress Rosina Vokes.

These successes established her literary career; in her own words: That I succeeded was due to tireless effort, unbroken health, a number of fortunate circumstances, and above all, what I am neither afraid nor ashamed to say, the kindness of the good God.

Among her political essays was a 1910 article for The Atlantic Monthly opposing women's suffrage, in which she also spoke ill of the extension of the franchise to African Americans after the Civil War.

Mitchell in American Women Writers remarks more critically, "Plot was never her strong point, and the perfect ladies and gentlemen, the overt racism, and the condescending tone are interesting only because they reflect values once widespread"[7] (41).