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Essay by Beth Powning

It began in a Toronto hotel room, reading an article in The Globe and Mail about the
York Retreat, a farm for mental patients conceived and run by Quakers in eighteenthcentury England. Although I grew up a Quaker, I had never heard of the place. Intrigued, I
tore out the article and, once home in New Brunswick, sought more information about it. I
began to see the shadowy shape of an historical novel taking place in the Yorkshire
asylumuntil, in the course of my research, I stumbled across the story of a New England
woman who had come from London with the great Puritan migration and had later become
a Quaker. Her name was Mary Dyer.
I sent away for the single published biography about her (Mary Dyer by Ruth
Plimpton.) And with that the eerie coincidences began. The book arrived just as I was
leaving for a family trip to the United Kingdom. The day after reading about how Mary Dyer
became a follower of Anne Hutchinsonwho defied the Puritan magistrates and ministers
in her famous 1638 trialI walked into a church in Boston, Lincolnshire, the Boston
Stump. A long plaque along one wall proclaimed this to be the very church that
Hutchinson attended, along with other Puritans before leaving England, seeking religious
freedom, in the 1630s. Several days later, we travelled to Wales; and when we arrived in the
village where we had booked a holiday home, there, in the town square, was a museum
dedicated to the sufferings of the early Quakers. After failing to find freedom from
persecution in the New World, Mary Dyer returned briefly to England and became a Quaker
herself. She would have encountered the people celebrated in that little Welsh museum.
As I continued studying Marys life, I discovered (scalp prickling!) that Sylvester
Manor in New York State, where Mary sought refuge in 165960, is the ancestral home of
my best friend. When my husband and I randomly picked Barbados for a vacation, I learned
that Mary had spent time there too, her ship blown astray on her return from England.
And I realized that there were similarities between Marys life, 400 years ago, and
mine. Mary and her husband left London seeking freedom in the wilds of the New World;
my husband and I left Connecticut during the Vietnam War for the safety of Canada. Mary
suffered a devastating stillbirth, as did I. I knew Marys New England countrysideas a
child, I had leaned against the bronze legs of the pastor Roger Williams, had played in fields
cleared by English settlers. And I grew up with strands of both Puritan and Quaker
sensibilities: the New England work ethic, a sense of inherent guilt and shame, straight-laced
austerity in the very lines of our plaster-walled, creaky 1790s house, the Puritanically
unadorned Congregational Church where I sat with my cousins and grandparents. Yet,
growing up, my ears were also filled with Quaker names like Rufus Jones, George Fox
and Pendle Hill; my first experience of Quaker Meeting, at the age of eight, was a room
filled with many clocks ticking in the silence; and I was taught to seek for the inner light
that of God in every man (sic).
In A Measure of Light, the novel I have since written about Mary Dyer, my epigram
comes from the Dutch philosopher, a contemporary of Marys, Baruch SpinozaI have
laboured carefully, not to mock, lament, or execrate, but to understand human actions
Where history could shed no light on Marys life, she compelled me to create a story for her;
this puzzling, forsaken and absolutely essential woman from the past would not let me go
until finally I understood.

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