As time passes and she sees Richard's affection recede, only her stubborn honesty gives her the strength to deny lip service to a doctrine she cannot truly accept and, at the last, courage to follow the dictates of her heart. She becomes part of a strange world in which men and women-even husbands and wives-live apart, coming together only for meals and for worship. When Richard joins the Shaker community, Rebecca goes with him, as a dutiful wife should, hoping that her love will ultimately win him back to her and to the larger world. The Shaker missionaries newly arrived in Kentucky find him an easy convert. At first the marriage is happy it is only after their child is stillborn that Richard shows preliminary signs of religious fanaticism in his insistence that this is God's punishment visited upon them. She cannot remember a time when she has not loved and trusted him and followed where he led. Rebecca Fowler is only seventeen when she marries Richard Cooper. In The Believers, first published in 1957, she continues her series about the settling of Kentucky with a moving story of love and marriage set in a Shaker community. In her historical novels about Kentucky, Janice Holt Giles has become known for the integrity with which she handles her material and for the realism with which she writes.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |