Ann Crowley

Ann Crowley was born on 8 May 1765 at Shillingford in Oxfordshire, one of the eight daughters of William and Catherine Crowley. Her father was a maltster and mealman — a solid provincial tradesman rather than a member of the great Quaker banking dynasties — and the household was a plain one. Crowley’s own account of her girlhood is unusually frank about what she considered her weaknesses, a fondness for music and for clothes, and unusually grateful for the restraining counsel of her parents. She was sixteen when she first became conscious of a call to the ministry. Her father died the year after.

For a time she lived quietly with her sisters, and by her own account was content to do so. That settled life broke up when three of the sisters married and one of them, Mary Ashby, died in 1791.

Coming Into the Ministry

The decisive encouragement came from outside the family. Deborah Darby and Rebecca Young, two ministers from the Quaker ironworking community at Coalbrookdale, travelled into Oxfordshire, and their example answered directly to what Crowley had been feeling. She left with them, and her confidence in speaking grew slowly, by accompanying other ministers rather than by any sudden liberty of her own. In 1794 she travelled through Wales with Mary Stevens and with George and Sarah Dillwyn.

The following year her mother died. As the eldest unmarried daughter, Crowley found herself responsible for her remaining sisters and had to set up a new household for them at Uxbridge, the town with which her name is now chiefly associated. The competing claims of family and ministry are the running tension of her life: when her sister Catherine Ashby died leaving a husband and six children, the surviving sisters arranged a rota to care for them, but Ann’s own concern was to travel.

The Great Journeys

In 1797 she was appointed companion and guide to Phoebe Speakman, a Pennsylvanian Friend whom Deborah Darby had brought over from America. The two women covered some four thousand miles through England, Wales, and Scotland over two years. It was exhausting work, and Crowley — who blamed the “northern blasts” for it — never fully recovered her health. Three years later she travelled again, in Norfolk, Essex, and Suffolk, with Priscilla Hannah Gurney. That journey exhausted her too, and she returned home to the further grief of her youngest sister Rebecca’s death.

She travelled in the ministry for the last time in 1815 and 1816, after which her doctors sent her and her sister to the sea at Hastings. She came back to Uxbridge, worshipped with the meeting there, and died at home on 10 April 1826.

Her memoir belongs to a genre that eighteenth-century Friends valued highly and that modern readers encounter rarely: the inward journal, concerned less with events than with the state of the soul that passed through them. It is reflective rather than eventful — a sustained meditation on grace, humility, and gratitude — and it was preserved in the great nineteenth-century Quaker collections alongside the memorials of far better-known Friends. Friends Illuminated has it in the research queue; it is not yet in production.

Biographical detail on this page follows Gil Skidmore’s article on Ann Crowley in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) and Josiah Forster’s memorial of her in Piety Promoted (Part XI, 1829).