A Spring Picnic and a Trip to the Colonial Past

Meeting up with bookish friends and sharing one of my all-time favorite books.

My Jane Austen dayplanner provides a quotation on each weekly spread page, and I thought last week’s line was quite appropriate:

“To sit in the shade on a fine day, and look upon verdure, is the most perfect refreshment.”

That line would partly summarize the week’s highlight, but there’s another Jane Austen snippet that also comes to mind:

“It is such a happiness when good people get together - and they always do.”

Earlier this month, Kate Howe and I organized a spring picnic at Pennsbury Manor State Park. Kate and I had some wonderful bookish adventures last fall and thought it would be fun to do something again in the spring with any subscribers who might be interested. We had a small but delightful group, including Rainey from Rainey Day Reads, Erica, and Morghan.

Looking out over the Delaware River

Back in the autumn when we started thinking about a spring picnic, we wondered whether the weather in late April/early May would cooperate. This time of year can be a bit risky for outdoor events, but it could not have been much more idyllic! It was warm but not too warm, a beautiful blue sky with puffy white clouds overhead, no summer bugs or crowds, and such a glorious setting. There was a great line in a tv show called The Librarians that my family was recently watching: “Architecture is just art we live in.” That is so true, and when you visit beautiful old buildings, you can feel it so clearly.

A view of the stately mansion house.

I love both British country houses and the Colonial/Revolutionary War period of American history, and both of those elements meet at Pennsbury. The property is a reconstruction of William' Penn’s manor house; the original estate fell into despair, but this version was rebuilt in the 1930s. It was so fascinating to hear about the process and the research. Apparently a letter was found in which William Penn wrote to his brother, who was overseeing the original construction in the 1680s, that the “back” of the house facing away from the river could be made of wood, but the “front” should be made of brick, since most visitors would approach by water. The location was partially chosen for the easy “commute” into Philadelphia that could be done by boat. There were so many fascinating details like that shared on the tour. We had our potluck lunch at a picnic table overlooking the river, with the brick manor house rising in the distance. The kitchen garden was just glorious; walking through it definitely gave me some inspiration for my own garden.

In the kitchen garden…I had no idea that chives sprouted such pretty purple blossoms.

It wouldn’t be a proper meet up, of course, without a book to chat about, and we settled on The Sherwood Ring by Elizabeth Marie Pope as our title to discuss. The fellow picnic guests all kindly shared their colonial/Pennsbury-inspired book recommendations in the vlog, but I didn’t actually include much of a review of The Sherwood Ring, so I thought I would type one up here on the blog!

I’m tempted to make this the first in a series where I break down my ultimate favorite books, because I would rank The Sherwood Ring in that number. Then again, I wonder if it’s a little dangerous to tout a title as your favorite, because there is nothing so fatal as high expectations. I know the book didn’t necessarily capture all the readers at our picnic, but then that’s part of the magic of reading. The same words speak differently to different readers.

Since we mentioned Felicity in the vlog…here she is!

For me, The Sherwood Ring checks all the boxes of what I look for in a book and is an absolute treat. Every time I re-read it, I can’t put it down because I’m so eager to get to my favorite scenes. There are so many wonderful elements: multiple romances, multiple mysteries and puzzles, a beautiful colonial manor house (why we chose it for our Pennsbury picnic book!), and such a unique parallel setting/set-up that moves back and forth between the narrator in the present day and her ancestors who lived through and fought in the American Revolutionary War.

In the book synopsis and in the story itself, the ancestors are described as ghosts, but probably the best way to think of The Sherwood Ring is as a frame story. The modern-day characters - the orphaned Peggy, her crusty Uncle Enos, and her new friend Pat - do get some development and some page time, but for the most part, they are the frame through which we hear about the exciting lives of Peggy’s ancestors. I think that might throw some readers off, because I can see how you might be disappointed if you were expecting to get to know Peggy et al and instead you’re constantly popping back into the eighteenth century.

My edition of The Sherwood Ring has some abstract but beautiful illustrations.

I would say the past is the best part of the book, due partly to the scholarly acumen of the author, Elizabeth Marie Pope. She worked as a college professor, and her specialty was Elizabethan history, which you can see in her two other works, The Perilous Gard , another excellent young adult novel and a Newberry award winner set in the Elizabethan time period, and Paradise Regained: The Tradition and the Poem, a very scholarly nonfiction work about Milton’s classic which I read during Lent.

Pope must also have had a penchant for the colonial period too. She makes historical figures like Washington, Benedict Arnold, and John André feel so real. They’re barely in the plot, but we get to hear all the gossip about them and see them through the eyes of their fictional contemporaries and acquaintances. Although I wonder just how fictional they were…I would love to know what inspiration Pope picked up from her research, and if the beautiful colonial mansion in the book, Rest-and-be-thankful, is based on a real house. Here’s how we first encounter the estate in the story:

“…the road was dipping down into a little valley that lay between two curving hills, a valley full of apple trees, all in full bloom - immense, straggling apple trees, the largest and oldest I had ever seen. Where the two hills met, there rose suddenly from the drifts of delicate flowers, as if from some enchanted sea, the mossy dark roof of a huge stone house…

I had never been in a place that looked so quiet, so utterly hushed. No one was in sight; not a leaf stirred or a voice broke the golden stillness that lay like a spell over everything…

‘So that was why they called it Rest-and-be-thankful,’ I murmured.”

The valley is quiet when Peggy arrives in the “modern day” of the frame story, but when the “ghosts” enter to share their tales, we discover that this region was in quite a furor during the Revolutionary War. A mysterious rogue redcoat named Peaceable Drummond Sherwood was hiding in the nearby hills, using guerrilla tactics and brilliant secret communication systems to strike against the colonists. Richard Graham is appointed by Washington himself to sniff Sherwood out, but Dick finds it a much more difficult task than he bargained for.

I love that Dick and Peaceable develop a begrudging respect for each other’s intelligence and ingenuity, in spite of the fact that they’re fighting on opposite sides. Peaceable is one of my favorite characters. He has an enviable sangfroid that can only be rivaled by the one and only Psmith, the eponynomous hero of Leave It to Psmith by P.G. Wodehouse which is, perilous as it is to admit it, another of my all-time favorite books.

At this point, we shall give the official spoiler warning for The Sherwood Ring.

SPOILERS AHEAD, my friends!

(You’ve clicked away by now if you don’t want any spoilers, haven’t you?)

There are two delightful romances in the book, although for me there’s no competition as to which is my favorite. The four figures from the past who we meet and hear from are the two couples: Dick Grahame and Eleanor Shipley, also Barbara Grahame (Dick’s sister) and Peaceable Sherwood. At our picnic, Kate compared Dick and Eleanor’s scene to Leia and Han’s “I love you.” “I know.” which I thought was so sweet and entirely accurate.

But Barbara and Peaceable’s romance has a lot more spark to it! They first meet when Peaceable rescues Barbara from a Christmas Eve blizzard. Peaceable and his squad have boldly holed up in the last place anyone would think to look for them: Rest-and-be-thankful itself. Barbara discovers that Dick, coming to what he thought was an empty house to get a Christmas gift, has been captured by Peaceable, and it’s up to her to rescue her brother, however charming their tory captor may be. I love that the moment Peaceable realizes that Barbara is “the one” is the same moment he realizes she’s actually managed to outwit him, something almost no one ever does. And then the way he proposes - but I’ll leave you to discover that for yourself!