Amelia, the Tale of a Plain Friend, and: Two Quaker Sisters (review)

BOOK REVIEWS45 Amelia, the Tale of a Plain Friend, by Jacobine Menzies-WUson and Helen Lloyd. Oxford University Press, New York, 1937. xii+300 pp. Illustrated. $5.00. Two Quaker Sisters. From the Original Diaries of Elizabeth Buffum Chace and Lucy Buffum Lovell. With an Introduction by Malcolm R. Lovell; Foreword by Rufus M. Jones. New York, Liveright, 1937. xxx+183 pp. Illustrated. THESE two books form a welcome addition to a group including Janet Whitney's Elizabeth Fry and South after Gettysburg: Letters of Cornelia Hancock from the Army of the Potomac, 1863-1865, which give to the present generation a personal glimpse into the lives of significant Quaker women. For all these books are based on a study of the most intimate sort of documents—personal letters and diaries. Amelia (Alderson) Opie, though her book purports to tell the tale of a plain Friend, did not join the Society till she had reached her fifty-sixth year; yet she knew Friends all her life, and was particularly intimate with Joseph John Gurney and his illustrious sister, Elizabeth Fry. Her special gift was for making and keeping friends ; and a record of her life inevitably throws light on her contemporaries. Thus we find in this volume an account of doings in the Gurney household which charmingly complements the story told by Janet Whitney, and we become aware of a romantic attachment for the solid Joseph John that survived his three marriages, an attachment which hovered on the edge of Mrs. Grundy's ideas of propriety, and is not so much as mentioned in Braithwaite's Memoirs. But we see others, of the gay world; for Mrs. Opie was by way of being quite the rage in the social whirl of London and of Paris. She married the painter, John Opie, who at his death was buried in Saint Paul's Cathedral, not far from Sir Joshua Reynolds; knew William Godwin, Mrs. Siddons, Thomas Holcroft, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charles James Fox, General Lafayette, the sculptor David d'Angers; and she met Napoleon, General Kosciuszko, Sir Walter Scott, and Marie-Amélie, the ex-Queen of the French. She was an indefatigable letter-writer, and apparently beloved wherever she went. She wrote novels which in their time had wide popularity, though upon her joining the Society of Friends she ceased busying herself with fiction. The book which tells of these contacts through a long life—Amelia died at the age of eighty-one—and of Amelia's own joys and sorrows is charmingly written, and hard to lay down when once begun. It is the kind of book that the layman reads and enjoys, and that the sober historian of Quakerism, or of the period of Amelia's life, needs for the sympathetic insight it gives into the life and manners of the times. THE DIARIES of the Buffum sisters do not show the conscious artistry of the preceding, for they were not written for publication, but for the kind of edification that many serious-minded persons, and 46 BULLETIN OF FRIENDS' HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION especially Friends of the last century, derived from ordering their thoughts into a narrative of the events of their lives. Mr. Lovell's Introduction , in fourteen pages, gives something of the background and genealogy of the family ; and the first narrative, that of Elizabeth Buffum Chace, written in her ninety-first year, tells in reminiscence of the childhood of this Rhode Island and Connecticut girl in a setting that reminds us of Whittier's Snowbound. The second part is more characteristically a diary, by Lucy Buffum Lovell, written under various dates from 1840 to 1843, and telling principally of the childhood illnesses and deaths of her three children—indeed a loving and pathetic narrative. The third part contains the reminiscences of Elizabeth Buffum Chace on the antislavery activities of her family and of the Quakers, beginning with the confession : "I am ashamed to say that my early Quaker ancestors in Newport, Rhode Island, were interested in the slave trade," continuing through the narrative of the opposition of Friends to antislavery activities, of the founding of the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1832, of her experiences in connection...