Abstract
The life writing of the women preachers of early Methodism provides rare insights into friendships, communal identities, conceptions of authorship, and textual sociability within a network of women writing in both youth and age. Mary Fletcher (née Bosanquet) (1739–1815), Sarah Ryan (1724–1768), Sarah Lawrence (1756–1800), and Mary Tooth (1778–1843) (collectively referred to as the Fletcher circle)1 played a central role in Methodism from the mid-eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, maintaining close relationships with John Wesley and with one another across two generations. There is an extensive manuscript archive of their personal writings still extant, including spiritual journals and diaries, autobiographies, transcribed oral testimonies, letters, sermons, and pocketbooks. The collection is discussed in recent histories of Methodism, but its significance for studies of women’s life writing has not previously been recognised. Eighteenth-century spiritual autobiography is traditionally associated with the rise of individualism and it is understood as a genre that developed out of the Puritan conversion narrative in its emphasis on rigorous self-examination, individual religious experience, and personal testimony. However, relationships are central to these women’s self-representations, as they present family histories that are spiritual rather than biological in origin, demonstrate the interdependence of narratives of self and other, and write a shared history.
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Notes
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© 2014 Amy Culley
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Culley, A. (2014). The Life Writing of Early Methodist Women. In: British Women’s Life Writing, 1760–1840. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137274229_2
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