The Living Remnant & Other Quaker Tales. By “KKK,” (Edith Florence O’Brien.) Published by Headley Brothers in UK, 1900.
A Friend came across this book and passed along a link. It’s a series of four related stories about a tightly-knit (i. e., very insular) British Quaker meeting community, in about 1875. The “tales” portray, in sequence: an old-fashioned courtship; the subsequent wedding; the final dissolution of a stubbornly backward-looking Quaker faction, fixated on a version of the faith that time has quietly but remorselessly passed by; and then closes with the prospect of possible renewal as well as change.
The writing initially seemed sentimental and superficial. For instance, the “courtship” described lasted about two weeks, and was essentially conducted via a single clandestine handwritten note and a white rose pinned to a dress. (Were Victorian Anglo-Friends really that unromantic?) Compared to this uber-minimalist plot, the agonized convolutions of Jane Austen’s characters make her novels read like hair-raising action thrillers. But the tales evince some subtle depth as the veneer of timeless placidity begins to swell and crack under the drip-drip of time and change.
By the end I was smiling ruefully at the irony of the book’s title, and the sense of having found a Quaker precursor to Fiddler on the Roof, from six decades in advance.
“Fiddler,” after all, was built out of short stories from another tradition-bound religious subculture under the pressures of change, by the Jewish writer Sholem Aleichem. Yet this Quaker prequel gives us a “Fiddler” minus the music, sans the gusto, and carries an undertone of slow decay rather than the shadow of recurrent communal tragedy.
No wonder “Fiddler” put Sholem Aleichem’s culture on Broadway for 3000+ performances and thrives vigorously in community theaters almost sixty years later. Meanwhile, The Living Remnant seems to have sunk into a century-plus of the intentional grey obscurity designed into Quaker culture. Is there more than antiquarian value here?
And was the book perhaps even a wee bit controversial among bookish British Friends in those times of cultural stasis and imperial heyday?
After all, the book was published pseudonymously, with only an ominous “K K K” standing in the author’s place on the title page. (Much tracking through search engines and online archives have thus far turned up exactly nothing about the reputed author behind those initials, Edith Florence O’Brien.)
Nevertheless, The Living Remnant is available again, uploaded in full by Googlebooks, and can be read today online, in full and for free at this link: