What a good time of year it is for curling up with a novel! Whether about real or fictional Friends, these books shed light on Quaker ways in other times.
For those who enjoy a good who-done-it, I highly recommend the award-winning Quaker Midwife Mysteries by Edith Maxwell. Heroine Rose Carroll is an 1880's New England midwife and feminist with a talent for detective work. Set in the same time period but in the Philadelphia area, Lilli De Jong follows the fierce determination of a young, unmarried Friend whose life is drastically altered by an unplanned pregnancy and her decision to keep her child.
Historical novels set in earlier times show courage and conviction of Friends as they were persecuted for preaching primitive Christianity. The Kendal Sparrow presents Elizabeth Fletcher of the Valiant Sixty as she spreads Friends' beliefs in Northern England and Ireland in the 1650's, much to her own peril. Vagabond Quakers: Northern Colonies, follows Quaker Missionaries Mary Tomkins and Alice Ambrose in the Massachusetts Bay Colony a decade later. Their harsh treatment was memorialized by John Greenleaf Whittier in his poem How the Women Went from Dover.
You can find more Friendly fiction here.
Also in this issue:
- Book Discussion - Fit for Freedom, Not for Friendship invitation
- New and Noteworthy - Quaker Quicks - Hearing the Light; These Walls Between Us
- Buy One, Get One Sale
- Friends Journal Reviews - November 2021 - Pursuade, Don't Preach; The Agitators
- Bookshop.org