In her historical novels about Kentucky, Janice Holt Giles has become
known for the integrity with which she handles her material and for the
realism with which she writes. In The Believers, first published in
1957, she continues her series about the settling of Kentucky with a
moving story of love and marriage set in a Shaker community.
Rebecca Fowler is only seventeen when she marries Richard Cooper. She
cannot remember a time when she has not loved and trusted him and
followed where he led. At first the marriage is happy; it is only after
their child is stillborn that Richard shows preliminary signs of
religious fanaticism in his insistence that this is God's punishment
visited upon them. The Shaker missionaries newly arrived in Kentucky
find him an easy convert.
When Richard joins the Shaker community, Rebecca goes with him, as a
dutiful wife should, hoping that her love will ultimately win him back
to her and to the larger world. She becomes part of a strange world in
which men and women--even husbands and wives--live apart, coming
together only for meals and for worship. As time passes and she sees
Richard's affection recede, only her stubborn honesty gives her the
strength to deny lip service to a doctrine she cannot truly accept and,
at the last, courage to follow the dictates of her heart.
In this novel, Mrs. Giles gives us a unique picture of everyday life in
a Shaker village, one of the experiments in utopian communal living that
are a part of American history. Realistically but with understanding,
she shows us a society animated not only by saintliness but by bigotry
and ordinary human frailties.
Janice Holt Giles (1905-1979), author of nineteen books, lived and
wrote near Knifley, Kentucky, for thirty-four years. Her biography is
told in Janice Holt Giles: A Writer's Life.
