Photo: Aldous Huxley in 1947
Brave, the elements: Jonathan Wooding on Aldous Huxley
‘Huxley’s work indicates a serious immersion in Quaker literature.’
Quakers are fortunate in being an apparently apolitical – but nonetheless dissenting and non-hierarchical – sect. Without vested interests or doctrinal red lines, we can readily be appraised and apprised by free-thinking people as representing ‘the way out of our difficulties’. Anti-clericalists, atheists, even anarchists find little to object to, and much to admire, in our blank Quaker rites. It’s of course possible to get quite cross with Quakers – there’s Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s dangerously ‘enthusiastic’ Quakers, Herman Melville’s ‘Quakers with a vengeance’ in Moby Dick, and even Virginia Woolf’s mousey Quakeresses flocking thoughtlessly around her Quaker aunt Caroline Stephen – but generally this criticism derives from a perception that these Quakers aren’t being Quaker enough.
