The Quaker Ostrich: Evangelical Quaker Novelist Jessamyn West as Liberal Friend

In the summer of 1929, married, and in graduate school at the University of California, Jessamyn West decided, almost on a whim, to attend a conference on writing at the University of Oxford in England. On July 14, two days after arriving, she attended the Friends meeting held every Sunday at Friends House in central London. This apparent happenstance decision introduced her to her first-ever silent meeting—the only kind held there—in the building that housed the headquarters and offices of London Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, the venerable "mother church" of world Quakerism. The venue was the "small meeting room," a large brown-shaded rectangular-shaped accommodation with hard benches, "made for worship, surely not for comfort," on four sides and heavy red drapes over the windows. There was no pulpit or lectern, no place for a choir, no alcove for a musical instrument, no minister. It was a wonder, she reported back to her family, "arranged in a strange way as compared with any Friends Church in Southern California."

Following the pattern of the other worshippers, West bowed her head, but after about fifteen minutes opened one eye only to find that the others had not so much bowed their heads as inclined them in meditation. She assumed this stance now too but kept a stealthy eye aimed at her watch. She also noted that she was probably the youngest person there. After about half an hour, one bewhiskered older man stood and intoned, "A dumb world is a dead world." Finally dawning on her that she had found a silent meeting, West sensed unity with this sentiment, but not before another visitor, who mentioned that she was from Philadelphia, arose to advise, "Strive always for the vision as yet unfilled." Then everyone rose when another person mumbled some undecipherable words. The chorus of "amens" following the unclear words suggested to West that the words she did not hear were a prayer. At precisely one minute to twelve, a woman reminded the meeting to "Spend not your money for husks," and a moment later another woman announced that there would be no meeting that evening, and people shook hands and arose to leave. Some of the regulars made her welcome and told her that if she needed help she should contact the Friends service council whose offices were in the building.

As it transpired, West had immediate need of the council. The next morning at her hotel, the matron informed her that her "husband" who had accompanied her and covered her bill on Friday would be arriving presently. Her actual husband being back home in Napa, California, she left hastily and went to the service council's offices where she got a card of introduction to the Penn Club, a proper Quaker hostel within walking distance for traveling Friends—though she was so anxious to get far away from her first lodging that she hailed a taxi. Within days she had also discovered the Library of the Society of Friends at Friends House, brimming with pamphlets, letters, and books going back to the seventeenth century, some conveying information about her Milhous ancestry and Quaker heritage, items she began copying to take home with her. Soon she found letters referring to her great-great-grandmother during her preaching mission to Britain. A new world she had never imagined opened before her, just because she happened to have gone to Friends House for meeting on Sunday.¹ Religiously she never seriously looked back, but she also never publicly cut her ties with her home church, the evangelical East Whittier Friends Church.

Before proceeding with West's personal journey, this Quaker evangelicalism needs some description. It had grown organically out of the experiences of midwestern Friends in the years immediately after the Civil War and sought the renewal of Quakerism and more broadly Christianity. Rooted in revivalism that sought to win unbelievers to Christ, it was, as described by a recognized Evangelical Friend and minister, "conservative" in doctrine, insisting that the Bible was the outward revealed Word of...