Society of Friends

JV , a late-seventeenth-century Quaker preacher, is best known for her autobiography; she also left letters addressed to individuals and epistles officially addressed to Quaker communities.

Born in the yeoman class, she was brought up an Anglican . In youth and for years after her marriage she felt spiritually lost, as a ship without an anchor among the merciless waves.

She came from a distinguished English Quaker family of the middle class.

A loyal, life-long member of the Society of Friends , PW was anything but narrow in her beliefs and practice. In middle life she wrote that without disparaging the value of [t]rue religion, she desired...

DW writes that she has a grievance, since she herself is experiencing oppression over tithes. She makes no claim to omniscience, broad-mindedness, or even good temper. But she is inspired by the courage and conviction...

ALW converted from the Society of Friends to Anglicanism (with her parents' consent); she was baptised into the Church of England at St Martin's Church, Winnall, near Winchester in Hampshire.

ALW was brought as a Quaker . Both her parents were members of the Society of Friends , to which her family had belonged for generations. They were also proud of their Welsh ancestry.

ALW 's uncle Samuel Miller Waring had left the Society of Friends to join the Anglican Church, and had published Sacred Melodies (1826), a collection of hymns. Through her uncle's example she was strengthened in...

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.

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...

DW 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...

She was a presumably English Quaker ; nothing is known of her social background. By the end of her life she held millenarian beliefs.

DW worked for her faith as a minister and preacher for the Society of Friends .

DW spent a large part of the years 1662-1663 in various London prisons for the offence of Quaker preaching, which the Act of Uniformity of May 1662 had pronounced to be illegal.

She writes here as a millenarian, who expects the conversion of the Jews and the Second Coming of Christ. She opposes the bureaucratization of the Quaker movement . Prophets, she says, have no regard to...