Dorothy White was one of the most prolific of the seventeenth-century
Quaker women pamphleteers (with twenty texts), apart from the more famous
Margaret Fell (whose texts are on average longer than hers). She was an incisive commentator on religious and political issues. Much of her work is prophetic, and some is in verse.
Milestones
May 1659 DW wrote
A Diligent Search amongst Rulers, Priests, Professors, and People, a pamphlet printed the same year, which she apparently intended for distribution around
Weymouth in
Dorset.
1684 DW broke a twenty-year silence with several appeals to
Quakers not to tone down their radicalism, including
A Salutation of Love to all the Tender-Hearted,
Universal Love to the Lost, and
The Day Dawned both to Jews and Gentiles.
6 February 1686 DW died of a fever in
London, according to early records, not long after her last published appeal to
Quakers not to forget their heroic and radical past.
