A Measure of Light: A Novel

A Measure of Light: A Novel

With Beth Powningâ€™s trademark elegance and insight into the hearts and minds of unforgettable women, A Measure of Light brings to life an extraordinary historical figure.

Mary Dyer is a seventeenth-century Puritan who flees persecution in England, only to find the colony of Massachusetts Bay as dangerous as the country she left behind. Though she is the wife of a successful merchant and mother to their children, she becomes stigmatized following a birth gone terribly wrong and is reviled as a friend to the infamous heretic Anne Hutchinson. Mary tries to accept New Englandâ€™s harsh realities, but is outÂraged by the cold-hearted Puritan magistrates, with their doctrinaire stranglehold on church and state, their subÂjugation of women, their wars against the natives in the surrounding territories and their vicious treatment of any who challenge their rule.

Mary becomes one of Americaâ€™s first Quakers. As both outcast and privileged citizen, caught between the callÂings of faith and the ambitions of her husband, she comes to the realization that she must follow her convictions in order to bring an end to the brutal repression of the Quakers in Massachusetts, for whom death by hanging is the ultimate punishment.

From Maryâ€™s relationship with Anne Hutchinson to her fiery exchanges with the colonial magistrates, A Measure of Light is both a sensitive work of imagiÂnation and meticulously true to the historical record. In this exceptional pairing of author and subject, Mary Dyer receives in the hands of Beth Powningâ€” herself a New Englandâ€“born Quakerâ€”the full-blooded recognition too long denied a woman of her moral stature and significance in shaping American history.

From the Hardcover edition.

Country	USA
Author	Beth Powning
Binding	Paperback
EAN	9780345808493
Edition	Reprint
ISBN	0345808495
Label	Vintage Canada
Manufacturer	Vintage Canada
NumberOfItems	1
NumberOfPages	336
PublicationDate	2016-03-08
Publisher	Vintage Canada
ReleaseDate	2016-03-08
Studio	Vintage Canada

A Measure of Light: A Novel

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