Miss West's Indiana fiction deals with the past. She projects her two Quaker narratives, The Friendly Persuasion (1945) and Except for Me and Thee (1969), backward into pre-Civil War Indiana, and even her long novel The Witch Diggers (1951) is set in the last decade of the nineteenth century, a period she could not personally have known. But she has the gift of making the past contemporary, and many a reader will testifiy to the realistic portraiture of nurseryman Jess Birdwell and his wife Eliza Cope, a Quaker minister before marriage….

The Birdwell speech is full of archaisms and localisms, many of which were Jessamyn West's own family legacy. (p. 54)

The life of Jess and Eliza Birdwell was continued by Jessamyn West in Except for Me and Thee, published twenty-four years after the first collection of Quaker stories. It is equally episodic, quietly realistic, and filled again with the folk speech...