  cover art  The Last Runaway  Tracy Chevalier  (Penguin; US:
Jan 2013)  What do we really know about Quakers? When we get
down to it, not much aside from our time-honored stereotypes:
the man on the box of oats, the 1956 Gary Cooper movie, Friendly
Persuasion, Aaron Copland’s Applachian Spring with its plaintive
Shaker hymns that evoke a dreamy vision of an agrarian past. A
good deal of our understanding is shaped by this image of a
clannish group of early American settlers, swathed in somber
colors who address each other with a Biblical formality and have
an unusually keen aptitude for quilting, baking, and founding
mid-Atlantic universities.  Tracy Chevalier, who has become one
of the most celebrated and popular writers of historical fiction
today, with sweeping novels such as Girl with the Pearl Earring
(1999), The Lady and the Unicorn (2003), and Remarkable
Creatures (2009), has turned her gaze to 19th century America,
in 1850, to rural Ohio, and particularly to the town of Oberlin,
the home of her own a