Plot
The Friendly Persuasion has as its common theme linking the fourteen chapters (only two of which, "A Likely Exchange" and "First Day Finish" are otherwise connected) the effects of the Quaker religion on members of a family and their interaction with their neighbors. West uses rich descriptives of geography and setting to bring out the dignity and strength of her characters. However her stated purpose in telling their story is to present descriptions of "real life" and "reality" as she understands them, not to elucidate the religion, stating that the Birdwells are characters "who happened to be Quaker" rather than personifcations of Quaker traits.
Three stories ("Shivaree Before Breakfast," "Lead Her Like a Pigeon,"and "Homer and the Lilies") were based on recollections of West's mother from her own girlhood. Family stories about her great-grandfather were the source for three others ("Music on the Muscatatuck,"A Likely Exchange," and "First Day Finish"). Although not connected to the own family or Quakers, "The Pacing Goose" was based on an actual incident chronicled in a compendium of early Indiana court cases.
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“The plot! The plot! What kind of plot could a poet possibly provide that is not surpassed by the thinking, feeling reader? Form alone is divine.”
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“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
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