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Vintage Canada
March 2016
On Sale: March 8, 2016
Featuring: Mary Dyer
336 pages ISBN: 0345808495 EAN: 9780345808493 Kindle: B00NDTQQE4 Paperback / e-Book
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Inspirational Historical | Historical
With Beth Powning’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 England’s harsh realities, but is outraged by the
cold-hearted Puritan magistrates, with their doctrinaire
stranglehold on church and state, their subjugation 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 America’s first
Quakers. As both outcast and privileged citizen, caught
between the callings 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 Mary’s
relationship with Anne Hutchinson to her fiery exchanges
with the colonial magistrates, A Measure of Light is
both a sensitive work of imagination and meticulously true
to the historical record. In this exceptional pairing of
author and subject, Mary Dyer receives in the hands of Beth
Powning— herself a New England–born Quaker—the full-blooded
recognition too long denied a woman of her moral stature and
significance in shaping American history.
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