A MEASURE OF LIGHT

A work of gripping historical fiction, A Measure of Light centers on the story of Mary Dyer, a Puritan who fled persecution in Elizabethan England only to find the Puritan establishment in Massachusetts every bit as vicious as the one she'd left behind.

Novelist Beth Powning, who was raised in a Quaker family in New England and is a member of the Mayflower Society, was inspired to write this novel after reading about the York Retreat, the first humane hospital for psychiatric patients, founded in England in the 1700s by English Quakers. During her research she read that a woman named Mary Dyer had been hung in Boston in the 1600s -- some years before the iconic Salem witchcraft trials -- for the crime of being a Quaker. She was utterly astounded that she had never heard of this woman and became obsessed with her story. Whereas the trial of Anne Hutchinson is well-known, Mary Dyer, who is Anne's side-kick in history, is mentioned in most historical accounts merely as the mother of a grotesquely deformed stillborn baby delivered, and hidden, by midwife Hutchinson. Banished from Boston after her ‘monster baby' was used by the Puritan authorities as evidence of God's displeasure with Anne and her followers, Mary left Massachusetts with her husband and children and walked through the forest to Roger William's haven of liberty, Rhode Island. From there, she eventually, and mysteriously, traveled alone to England, where she met George Fox and became a Quaker. When she returned to Rhode Island, she and her fellow Quakers began an assault upon the Massachusetts theocracy, with its fearsome intolerance, knowing full well that the penalty was death. One of America's first Quakers and among the last to face the gallows for her convictions, Mary Dyer receives here in fiction the full-blooded treatment too-long denied a figure of her stature: a woman caught between faith, family, and the driving sense that she alone can put right a deep and cruel wrong in the world. This is gripping historical fiction about a woman who chafed at the boundaries of her era in support of women's rights, liberty of conscience, intellectual freedom, and justice. BETH POWNING was born in Putnam, Connecticut, and studied Creative Writing under E. L. Doctorow at Sarah Lawrence College. Her most recent novel, The Sea Captain's Wife, was hailed by The Globe and Mail as “the work of an extraordinary writer,” by the Edmonton Journal as “a marvelous read,” by the Ottawa Citizen as “not to be missed,” and by Booklist as “an exciting, adventurous story about a woman's hidden strength.” Beth was lucky to have the historical novelist's gift of a biography with many gaps. No one knows anything about Mary's early life. No one knows why she returned to England, or what really happened to her there. She appears in tiny fragments in history -- landing in Boston on a ship from Barbados; wife of Rhode Island's Attorney General -- but of her soul, her secrets, her true past, history is silent.