A way forward

 

In the Library. Thomas Pole. 1806

I have been giving some thought to what effect Britain Yearly Meeting 2023 has had on me.

I have been going to Yearly Meeting now, fairly regularly, for nearly 50 years. Sometimes it has been inspiring, sometimes difficult, even depressing, but I have kept on going as I always find something there to feed my spiritual life.

This time I found that, beginning with the introduction on the Book of Discipline Revision by Rosie Carnall, I was often reminded of my good intentions which I had not followed up on. I meant to send in possible extracts to the committee, particularly from the 18th century which is woefully under-represented at the moment - but I have not got round to doing it.

As I listened to Rosie - and to William Penn - the words of the pragmatic 18th century Quaker John Bellers came into my mind. In 1714 he said 'He that doth not write whilst he is alive can’t speak when he is dead.' Death is always a possibility but at 75 years old it feels closer than it once did. I have researched extensively and given talks and workshops on spiritual autobiography and 18th century Quakers. I have written blog posts on a variety of Quaker subjects but increasingly infrequently.

Sitting in the Yearly Meeting sessions I had an experience I have had before, an inward 'voice' prodding me, pushing me forward, repeatedly reminding me that I must write. If not now, when? I must send extracts to the Revision Committee. I must get on with my 18th century researches and put them into some order. I must write and even publish - articles or even a book - and I must come back to this blog.

So I have made a start by sitting down at my computer and returning to the work of transcribing the 18th century letters which I photographed in Friends House Library many months ago. Once that is done I hope I will see where to go next.

It was becoming clear to me before Yearly Meeting that I needed to step back from the many Quaker roles which I had undertaken and by the end of this year I will have let most of them go. At first I could not see a way forward from this but after Yearly Meeting I do. What I am working on may seem to others too personal, irrelevant to the wider world, but I have a sure sense that this is the path that I am being led, or 'pushed', to take. I will try to be faithful to that leading.

 

 

Here I go again!

Woman at a window. Jacobus Vrel. 1654

In April last year I decided to try to resurrect this blog. I had good intentions but I only managed three posts in 2021, all in April!

Over the years I have often had problems with writing regularly here although, as I said last year, I have been writing regularly elsewhere. I think perhaps that a blog post feels like a substantial piece of writing - and certainly my historical posts do require quite a bit of research - so that I often feel too intimidated to begin.

With the beginning of a new year I feel inspired to try again, but not to be too hard on myself. I will aim to write once a month (or 12 times a year) and I will broaden my range of topics. Sometimes, as I am doing now, I will just sit down and write and see what comes. I will write about Quakers and Quaker history but may change my format. I hope to share some passages of Quaker writing that have helped me and may even suggest passages to the Book of Discipline Revision Committee! I may also share other passages that I have written in my commonplace book over the years.

Another way in which I hope to continue with this blog is through visual images. Over on Facebook I have been sharing art from my Pinterest boards each day without comment. Perhaps here I can comment about the art, the artist and what the image means to me.

I have good intentions but I have had those before and not written. Let's see how I get on in 2022!

Waste Not, Want Not

This weekend I am spending time at the annual conference of QUIP (Quakers Uniting in Publications) as I have often done in the past. It is different this time of course as rather than travelling sometimes long distances to greet each other in person, we are seeing one another's faces on Zoom. I used to be much more involved in the running of the group than I am now so in some ways I feel more of a spectator than a participant but it is still good to connect with friends from all over the world and to meet new people too, even if only virtually.

Although I have not been writing my blog for the last year or two I have still been writing, particularly in my diary, and thinking about where to go next. I have come to a point now where I want to continue my research into Quaker history and into spiritual autobiography and life writing more generally. In order to go forward I will need to take stock, to look at what I have done and what there is still to do, to see what I can recycle and reuse from my past writings and research notes and where there are gaps I need to fill.

I joined QUIP as a publisher and 25 years ago Sowle Press (the desk-top publishing enterprise which I ran with my husband Chris) produced a book on spiritual autobiography, Turning Inside Out, based on my experience as a Joseph Rowntree Quaker Fellow. Following this I wrote and we published two collections of short biographies of Quakers through the ages - Dear Friends and Sisters (1998) and Dear Friends and Brethren (2000). I was asked about Dear Friends and Sisters at the conference yesterday but had to report that we have no stock left.

I continue to be a member of QUIP as a writer and there is a crossover in this blog between publishing and writing. I have written quite a lot of Quaker biographies here and many of them are based on pieces from Sisters and Brethren, often added to from further research. In the future I intend to continue this process and to share my researches in other ways. I do not want the work I have done and will do to be wasted so I need to remember the wise words of the historian Barbara Tuchman, 'Research is endlessly seductive; writing is hard work'.

I value my continuing connection with QUIP and the inspiration and practical help that I have received and still receive from the organisation and its members. I look forward to the rest of the conference and to conferences to come - perhaps not all of them virtual.

Resurrecting My Blog

Still life with books and primroses by the Finnish artist Marga Toppelius-Kiseleff. 1886

 

 

 

Easter seems like a good time to try to put some new life into this blog again. I have written nothing for nearly two years but recently I had occasion to look back at my posts and wonder whether I could make another attempt to continue.

While many people began to write blogs and share their thoughts during the pandemic I went back to my handwritten diary and wrote much more regularly, almost daily, there. I have also spent much more time on social media, sharing daily art from my Pinterest boards on Facebook and expanding my use of Twitter to include more art, humour and even virtual friends.

The isolation of the past year has, in some ways, been easier for me than for many others. I have not been alone and my husband, the driver, has been the one to make forays into the outside world. As we are both retired we have not had any work worries as we are used to working from home on our various projects. We have adapted our routines to include many more deliveries than before and also Zoom meeetings of various kinds. We have also been able (when restrictions allowed) to see family and friends outside in various locations.

I have wondered why I did not include blog writing in my altered routine but can find no convincing answer except that I have always struggled to keep writing here and the uncertainty and fear underlying everything this last year did not improve my tendency to procrastinate!

As the seasons turn however I have found a new resolve to look again at my research into 18th century Quakers, particularly Catherine Payton Phillips, to identify gaps and fill them where I can and to do some writing with a view to publication in some form. I hope that writing here will help with that and that sharing what I write will also be of some use, both to myself and to others.

So here I go, making yet another new start. I hope to find companions on the way.

Turning Inside Out again?

For the second time a course on 18th century Quakers which I had hoped to run for Woodbrooke has been cancelled because of a lack of bookings. This has led me to consider what to do next. I am not going to abandon the 18th century but perhaps the time has come to approach it in a different way. I shall continue to try to 'introduce you to my friends' through this blog and I will look into the possibility of creating an online course for Woodbrooke for 2020.

At the same time I will put some more effort into research and writing and try to make progress on my biography of Catherine Payton Phillips. I have ideas for some journal articles which I will focus on. I know from long experience that, as the historian Barbara Tuchman put it, 'Research is endlessly seductive. Writing is hard work'. I think that now is the time to do some of that work.

Also, for a while now I have been feeling nudged towards a new direction - or rather to a new approach to an old path. It is twenty-five years since I set out as a Joseph Rowntree Quaker Fellow to give workshops on spiritual autobiography up and down the country. I talked about this in earlier posts on this blog - first of all ten years ago and then later when I was wrestling with some difficult questions.

Having published my book Turning Inside Out; an exploration of spiritual autobiography in 1996 and given up the workshops after ten years, I thought that spiritual autobiography, although still an interest, had faded into the background of my life, except in its connection to my historical research and writing.

Recently though I have been contacted by a few Friends in different parts of the country who had read my book and wanted to use it as a basis for workshops in their meetings to allow people to share their spiritual journeys. Encouraged by this I got out my notes and at long last transcribed the two background talks I gave as part of the workshops from longhand to the computer. Of course they need updating but I may now look at ways of publishing them as I originally intended to do.

I am also putting together a new Woodbrooke course with Rhiannon Grant on 'Spiritual Blogging' which is due to run in May 2019. It will be a new experience to work with someone else on different approaches to spiritual autobiography and I am looking forward to it.

I am also aware that I need to do more work on my own spiritual autobiography. I have a title - and used it for this blog - but so far I have only written fragments in different places. I was inspired by some of the writers I met at the QUIP conference earlier this year, especially Iris Graville and her memoir Hiking Naked, both to read more and to go back to writing about my spiritual journey. I need to turn inside again before I can take the next step, turn inside out and share what I have found with a wider audience.

So it seems to me that what I am being led to do is not so much a change of direction as a closer integration of the two strands of my endeavour - spiritual autobiography and 18th century Quakers. I need to allow what appear to be stumbling blocks to become stepping stones.

Laid Down

It is nearly a year since I last wrote this blog but now seems a good time to start again. The title of this post is Quaker terminology for what happens when a piece of work comes to an end. It is laid down and the group or committee which has been carrying it on ceases to exist.

A long-standing committee on which I have served for just over a year and clerked since the beginning of 2018 has just been laid down by the central committee in charge of it. The reason for this is unclear and communication throughout could have been better but the decision has been made and the committee has been wound up. When we realised what was happening the committee wrote a minute and tried to change the central committee's mind as we did not think that our work was at an end, but this was in vain. It appears that an alternative approach is being sought but our committee has been laid down.

Under Quaker discipline of course I accept this decision but I have been wrestling with the way it has made me feel. I cannot help feeling rejected and a failure even though rationally I know that this was not the intention of the central committee.

In my working life I have been made redundant twice and both times I knew it was not my fault. In one instance the redundancy arose from a change of policy and in the other my job was tied to that of someone who the organisation wanted to dismiss. On both occasions I felt shock, rejection and a sense of failure that took a long time to work through.

Is there a difference between a committee or people engaged on a particular piece of work deciding that they have come to a stop and therefore laying themselves or the work down and having that work taken from them or laid down by another body? I think it is obvious that there is a difference. Recognising that an end has been reached is a way of taking control of the situation rather than having a decision imposed - even if the reasons for that decision are valid. I wish that there had been a way of helping our committee to understand and take a greater part in the decision that was made.

It has been hard but writing this post has helped me to continue the process of reconciling myself to the situation as it is. I am taking advantage of the time and space I have been given and welcome the opportunity to go back to my research and writing. I am sure that a way will open if I am attentive to my Inward Teacher. As I lay down one set of responsibilities I am taking up this blog again and hope to write regularly, at least once a month, on Quaker history and other matters that I need to explore in writing.

Quaker Alphabet Blog 2015-2017 - Z for Zed - The End

This is my last post in the Quaker Alphabet Blog. Since 2013 I have been through the alphabet, writing about Quaker related subjects, four times. Most of the other people who set out on this journey together have moved on to other things and it is time for me to do the same.

I have found this a useful prompt for my blogging - although sometimes no prompt is loud enough for such an arch-procrastinator as myself. The alphabetical structure has sometimes been difficult - not many names begin with Z, although some do, and some letters are much more difficult to find subjects for than others. I was particularly proud of X for Xylography!

I set out to use this format in part to continue to write about lesser-known Quakers of the past and I am happy to have done that. Of my biographical posts the most viewed has been Annie Elizabeth Clark. I certainly intend to continue with this theme and it will be a relief not to have to squeeze my writing into the confines of the alphabet.



Occasionally my alphabetical posts have been historical in other ways and there are themes there which I may try to expand on in future.

Another strand of my blogging has always been the autobiographical and when my life experience and my Quakerism have intersected some more personal posts have appeared in the alphabetical sequence.

So this is not really an ending. I am leaving one particular framework behind but I hope I can use it as a stepping stone to more writing. The difficulty that the alphabet structure was meant to remedy still remains - how to make myself sit down and write. To find out whether I have made any progress there you will have to watch this space!

Quaker Alphabet Blog Week 52 - Z for Zed

Well here we are at the end of 2013and I have come to the end of this year's Quaker Alphabet blog. This post is about Zed, the ending (or not) and what I have learned over the year.

Firstly I would like to say a big thank you to my fellow bloggers, Rhiannon and Stephanie. Without their inspiration and different take on subjects I think I would have given up long ago. Rhiannon has already started a new project based on the liturgy and I look forward to finding out what Stephanie will do next.

The format we agreed on, with two consecutive posts for each letter, allowed me to divide my posts up into one biography and one general topic for each segment. I made a plan at the beginning of the year and sketched out some possible subjects, some of which I stuck to and some of which changed. Sometimes I really did not know what I was going to say until I sat down at the computer to write while other posts took more than a week to research. I also enjoyed finding images to go with the words.

My blog has never been one to attract a lot of traffic. My statistics would normally show me fifty viewings or less although sometimes I seemed to say something that more people wanted to read and my views reached several hundred. For the Quaker Alphabet the picture has not changed a lot, although I have become aware of what a difference sharing posts on Facebook and Twitter can make. However occasionally this year my posts have been noticed by Quakerquaker and this has made quite a difference. I am not expecting to reach vast numbers of people but I have enjoyed the comments, both on the blog and on Facebook, and am glad that sometimes what I write seems to have been helpful.

Having said that I am not playing the numbers game I have done some analysis of the first 50 weeks! My most popular post was on Solitude and Sociability with 730 views, way out in front of the next contender Visiting at 358. 5 posts reached more than 300 views and 8 posts more than 200. The largest group of posts (23) were viewed over 100 times with 13 posts reaching less than 100 views. The least popular post at the moment is Y for Yearly Meeting with 44 views but even that is not bad for my blog. On the whole the topics were more popular than the biographies but I am happy to report that it was a close run thing and my fourth most viewed post was on Solomon Eccles. 

It was good for me to write regularly and I hope to continue to do so. I shall therefore be starting another Quaker Alphabet blog in 2014 although this time I will be writing it every two weeks. I hope that the space between will fill with other posts on a greater variety of topics - let's wait and see! I also hope that more people will take part in this endeavour so that we can share a greater variety of Quaker voices. I have set up an 'event' on Facebook which I hope will have some result and if anyone reading this feels inspired to try a Quaker Alphabet blog for 2014 do please comment. There is no restriction on the form which such an enterprise should take - short or long, words or pictures or a combination of both - just give it a go!

Quaker Alphabet Blog - Week 26 - M for Katharine Moore

Katharine Moore in 1989

Katharine Moore was one of the most inspirational teachers I have ever encountered. I sat in the front row of her lessons on Blake and Jane Austen when I was 16 or 17 and felt my mind almost physically stretched by her erudition and enthusiasm. She spoke to her pupils on equal terms and demanded an equal engagement in return. At the time I did not know anything about her life or that she was a Quaker but over the years I learned more about this extraordinary woman. I am glad that many years later I wrote her a letter acknowledging my debt of gratitude and this blog post is a way of continuing that.



Una Katharine Yeo was born in 1898 in Reigate, Surrey. Her father, a rigorous Presbyterian, worked in London in insurance. In her memoir Queen Victoria is very ill (1988) Katharine summarises the religious atmosphere in which she was brought up. 'God and Jesus . . . roughly corresponded to my father and mother. God and my father were all-powerful and all-knowing: they gave orders and had to be obeyed; sometimes they shouted. My father could not shout so loudly as God when it thundered, but he had a good try. Jesus and my mother never shouted, and they loved me whatever I did, though they too liked to be obeyed.' 

Lady Margaret Hall today

However certain he was of his own beliefs Katharine's father was not narrow minded when it came to his daughter's education. She was sent to Wycombe Abbey school and from there her father encouraged her to gain a place at Oxford in the first exhilarating period of women's acceptance as full members of the university. Katharine spent three very happy years (1918-1921) reading English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford inspired by teachers such as Janet Spens, the Elizabethan scholar, Walter Raleigh, first Oxford professor of English literature, and Gilbert Murray, regius professor of Greek. 

Her degree equipped Katharine for her future work as a teacher and writer and a short interlude after university, working in the Lady Margaret Hall Settlement in Lambeth, was an eyeopener about poverty for a middle-class girl. Very shortly afterwards, however, Katharine's time was to be fully taken up by different responsibilities. In 1922, she married Dr Harold Moore, a widower twenty years her senior with three young girls, and soon she herself had twins, Jane and Christopher, for whom she wrote her first children's book, Moog, in 1936, with illustrations by Jane. This was followed by a series of educational books for children. Her marriage was very happy and her husband - later a CBE and the first president of the Institution of Metallurgists - continued the supportive tradition of the men in her family. 

Walthamstow Hall school

In her 30s Katharine Moore discovered Quakerism and with it a belief in a gentler, more compassionate God than that epitomised by her father. As her children grew older she looked for employment and in 1943 was offered a part-time teaching post at Walthamstow Hall school for girls in Sevenoaks, Kent where the family then lived. She wrote an account of her wartime experiences in another memoir A Family Life 1939-45 published in 1989. After the war she was offered a full-time post at Walthamstow Hall and remained there until her retirement (and afterwards when she returned to teach one day a week and I was one of her pupils).

In 1947 Katharine and Harold's son Christopher, then 23, was drowned in a holiday accident. Katharine spoke of the terrible loss as dividing her life in two, but she strove for, and ultimately attained, the goal of turning suffering to good account, gaining a depth of understanding of other people's tragedies. She was very busy with her family but always found time for teaching, reading and writing - the life of the mind balanced with domestic life.

Joyce Grenfell

In 1957, in answer to a perceived slight to her beloved Oxford professor, Walter Raleigh, Katherine Moore wrote to the entertainer Joyce Grenfell and this began a 22-year pen friendship which ended only with Joyce's death in 1979. They agreed never to meet in order to express themselves with greater freedom and this resulted in an unusually satisfying exchange of ideas, the record of an extraordinary companionship of minds, particularly in spiritual and religious matters. As it went on the correspondence did contain personal matters too, especially after the death of Katharine's husband Harold in 1972. Some of their letters were published in 1981 under the title An Invisible Friendship.

Katharine Moore's first book for adult readers, influenced by her Quakerism, was an anthology, The Spirit of Tolerance, commissioned by Victor Gollancz in 1964. The titles and subjects of Katharine's later non-fiction books reflect her preoccupation with women's need for independence and her religious development - Cordial Relations: The Maiden Aunt In Fact And Fiction (1966); Victorian Wives (1974); and She For God: Aspects Of Women And Christianity (1978). 

 As she grew older Katharine continued to develop her writing and thinking. She published her first novel,Summer at the Haven (1983), set in an old people's home with an old lady as its central character, at the age of 85 and received the Authors' Club Silver Quill Award for the most promising first novel of 1984. Her unusual subject came from her own experience - old age and its unacknowledged fears, pleasures and trials - and another two novels on the same theme followed, The Lotus House (1984) and Moving House (1986). Critics were enthusiastic, comparing her to Elizabeth Gaskell, and she gained a devoted following among readers of all ages. After her three full-length novels, she produced a witty and humane collection of short stories, Six Gentle Criminals (1990), and an exercise in historical recreation, A Particular Glory (1994) the fictional biography of Damaris, daughter of John Wesley's friend and mentor Vincent Perronet, vicar of Shoreham, Kent, where Katharine lived. 

Katharine Moore remained always involved with life, family, friends, Quakers and the life of the mind, living on until 2001 when she died at the age of 103. "I never had much time for old people," she said in her later years, "so, perhaps, this long life is God teaching me a lesson." Her whole life was a lesson to those who read her books, were inspired by her teaching or knew her as a friend and I am grateful to have been one of that number.