Society of Friends

AO , who was publishing at the end of the eighteenth century and during the earlier nineteenth century, is best known as a novelist, but was also a dramatist, poet, and short-story writer. The opinions...

She came from a cultured, financially comfortable middle-class but Unitarian English family. Her class status meant that even after she converted from Dissent to Quakerism , her attitudes remained worldly in comparison with those...

The publisher was said to have offered her a thousand pounds for this novel and had gone so far as to advertise it for sale. On 6 December AO wrote to Elizabeth Fry denying...

When she entered the Society of Friends , AO joined a group which was deeply suspicious of fiction and felt that writing ought to concentrate on truth-telling and moral instruction. Opie tried to conform, and...

This was the first book that she published as a Quaker , and to people in the Society of Friends she justified the practice of fiction by reminding them of the parables of Jesus. Though...

Response was tepid in England. The Literary Gazette called this book by one of its long-time favourites a milk-and-water work, poised between Quakerism and satire on the fashionable world, and more successful as morality than...

The nobility of the skin means a class system based on race as others are based on birth or money. Nooth's translation has no preliminary pages, no address by translator to reader. Grégoire cites his...

IM was born Irish but grew up in England from babyhood, with holidays in Ireland. Her mother's family, with a history as Anglo-Irish adherents of the Church of Ireland , had come down in the...

Of a Sinful State, written the following year, shows that the young poet already understood the potential cost of belonging to the Society of Friends : she prays to bear / The World's Revilings...

MM situates her letter, like other early ones to Frances, in the context of her desire for her cousin's Temporal and Eternal Welfare, that is, her conversion to the Society of Friends . This...

Her version of the happy man or choice of life trope unsurprisingly specifies health, work, a house securely owned, an equall Loyal Spouse, and a friend, as ingredients for worldly happiness. She then gives...

Mary Southworth , now in her early thirties, wrote the news to her cousin Frances that she was imprisoned with many others in Lancaster Castle for attending a Quaker meeting and refusing to swear the...

MM , at the palace of the Bishop of Chester and Lancaster, debated with Bishop Nicholas Stratford and other ecclesiastics on the legality, or rather the scripture authority for, compulsory payment of tithes to the...

MM sent a poem in Latin to her husband , who was again in prison for their Quaker faith: this is one of many short poems that made part of her letters to him in...

MM , a Quaker of the later seventeenth century, wrote in prose and poetry all her life. Her surviving prose consists of religious meditations and letters; her poetry, also centred on God and her faith...