The Virginia Exiles

During the Revolution, a group of Pennsylvanians, most of the members of the Society of Friends, were banished to Virginia because they refused to subscribe to a loyalty oath. Around this little known episode in American history, Elizabeth Gray Vining has built a story of moral courage which has a deep significance today. 


Caleb Middleton, one of the seventeen Friends, was arrested when his father decided to close down his iron furnace until peace should be restored. Though Caleb felt it was right to resist British tyranny he stood firm with the other Friends.


Without trial, the Friends were exiled to the mountains of Virginia and there, amid the strangeness and unfamiliarity of frontier life, they work out their relationships and discover their destinies.


Caleb meets and falls in love with the Virginia girl. Among the other exiles are the cabinet maker, Thomas Affleck, who has been wrenched away from his wife and children; Thomas Pike, a fencing and dancing master whose pretty wife had attracted Caleb back in Philadelphia; and John Hunt, oldest of the group, who is called upon to show physical courage equal to his moral courage fortitude.


The Virginia Exiles is a solid, substantial and continually absorbing novel, which conveys the quaker quality of quiet and luminous integrity. It is a timeless and powerful defense of liberty of conscious and the rights of the individual in a free country.


“Ms. Vining has woven a fascinating novel, yet one that sticks closely to the known facts and presents an accurate picture of all that happened . . . a moral lesson for our times . . . “—Chicago Tribune


“Here is a novel of high courage, moral courage, dedicated to the defense of individual rights. The love story is dramatic, vivid and convincing . . . It has the marching drive of a great faith.” —Christian Herald


Her book unquestionably has more than ordinary historical interest—plus an illumination from the serene dignity of the Quaker spirit.”—New York Times Book Review


“A moving historical novel . . . Ms. Vining is uncommonly faithful to the facts of history.” —Herald Tribune Book Review


About the Author

Elizabeth Gray Vining (1902 - 1999) wrote many books for adults and young people, most of the latter, including the Newbery Award winner Adam of the Road, under the name Elizabeth Janet Gray.

The settings for Mrs. Vining’s novels range from thirteenth-century England in Adam of the Road to present-day Japan in The Cheerful Heart. In The Taken Girl the setting is Philadelphia in the nineteenth century. Mrs. Vining was born and brought up in Germantown, so she is writing about a city she knows well and about the Quaker background that is part of her heritage.

During and immediately following the Second World War Mrs. Vining wrote reports, articles, and appeals for the American Friends Service Committee until, in 1946, she was appointed English tutor to Crown Prince Akihito by the Imperial Household of Japan. She remained in Japan for four years as tutor to the Crown Prince and also taught other members of the Imperial Household and the boys and girls at the Peers and Peeresses schools.