Bacon has lots in thin volume ‘Year of Grace’ fully developed

YEAR OF GRACE: A NOVEL, by Margaret Hope Bacon, Quaker Press, Philadelphia, 2002, 191 pages, $12.95.

Faith Smedley is a Quaker, 76 years old and dying of cancer – but readers of Margaret Hope Bacon’s novel don’t have to be any of these things to be drawn into the world of this soul who chooses to spend the last year of her life in a cabin in the woods by a river in New Jersey.

Bacon has a summer home near the coast and attends a nearby Friends meeting. Her novel “Year of Grace” is fiction, but shows the same attention to detail found in her several historical works, such as “Valiant Friend: The Life of Lucretia Mott.”

Like many of the women Bacon has written about – and certainly like suffragist Mott, Faith is independent and bold beyond her times.

The character contains elements of “several women who had interesting lives,” Bacon explained, including one who was dying. “Her last year was so valiant and inspiring to me.”

Bacon herself had started out to be a journalist.

“I was surprised I got into such an amount of biography and history,” she said. “One thing led to another, but I never let go of the more creative side.”

Eventually, Bacon decided the woman called Faith should come to the printed page.

More youthful and progressive, even, than some of her children, the fictional Faith has lost none of the ideals that took her to France and Algeria in her work as a Quaker years before.

Carefully, the senior citizen of 1968 measures and conserves the energy she knows is dwindling, but just as carefully gives a generation portion of herself to go to bat for a neighboring family facing discrimination. For her, social activism is very personal.

Faith is treasured and loved by family and friends, and yet honest about her flaws and her humanity – quick to note, especially, any instance when she fails to achieve the tolerance she values so xxxmuch.

“I ought to know how to speak to that of God in Friend Paxton,” she says of a fellow Quaker with whom she’s having substantial differences, “but I don’t seem to know how.”

Bacon has crafted a full main character – and a very full novel, despite its fewer than 200 pages.

It is a book about dying, about Quakerism, about what it means to be a woman, about relationships with children and grandchildren, about the ability to look back over a long life with clear eyes. And because the volume is not overly long, readers will find themselves wanting to revisit Faith.

Even better, they should reach for the opportunity to meet Margaret Hope Bacon. The author of “Year of Grace” will read from and sign books 6-8 p.m. Friday, Oct. 3, at Rue Cottage Books in Southwest Harbor.

Nicols Fox, the writer who owns Rue Cottage Books, says of Faith, “To her surprise, the world intervenes and her leave-taking is not quite as tranquil as she has imagined. The social issues to which she has devoted her life follow her even here. The story is set in the late ’60s and her own family, she realizes, is not immune to the strains of cultural change experienced during the decade. Yet she was right about one thing – the river itself is a source of strength as she copes not only with illness and dying but with injustice and domestic tension.”

Roxanne Moore Saucier edits The Weekly and writes the geneology column Family Ties in the Style section. She can be reached at Familyti@bangordailynews.net.