Memoirs of Elizabeth Collins
Elizabeth Collins of Upper Evesham, New Jersey (1755–1831) was a minister among Friends for more than fifty years. Born a weakly child not expected to live, twice married and once widowed before she was twenty-five, she outlived nearly everyone she loved. Drawn chiefly from her own journal and letters and first printed in 1833, her Memoirs are the record of a woman who kept going — the long rides through the Jerseys and into Virginia, the fever in Philadelphia, the run of sudden bereavements, and at the end the grief of the Separation that tore the Society she had served all her life. A modern English edition with linked scripture and historical references.
- Fifty years in the ministry, told from her own journal and letters
- An eyewitness of the Philadelphia yellow fever of 1793 and the Separation of 1827
- EPUB format
This edition
Read itE-book · EPUB
- Time to read1.8 hours
- Length25,324 words
- Files1 EPUB, DRM-free
How we get 1.8 hours
This figure is here so you can compare one book against another. Every title on the site is timed from its own word count at the same reading speed — nothing is adjusted book by book — so if this edition says 1.8 hours and another says half that, the second one really is about half the reading. It is a measure of size, in the way a page count is. Your own pace is your own: at the speeds typical adult readers actually manage, this edition runs anywhere from 1.4 hours to 2.4 hours.
What is in this edition
| Modernized text | 22,429 words |
|---|---|
| Introduction, chapter summaries and notes written for this edition | 2,895 words |
| Total | 25,324 words |
The introduction, the chapter summaries and the notes on people, places and unfamiliar terms were written for this edition. They are 2,895 of the 25,324 words above, and they are part of what you are buying.
Counted from the text of the EPUB you receive. Navigation, the title page, the table of contents and the licence page are excluded — they are packaging, not reading.
The reading rate
238 words per minute, for adult silent reading of non-fiction, applied unchanged to every title on the site. We did not pick the number; it is the pooled result of a published meta-analysis. Nothing is adjusted book by book — that consistency is what makes two of these figures worth comparing.
Brysbaert, M. (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language, 109, 104047. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2019.104047
190 studies, 18,573 participants.
The same paper puts most adult readers between 175 and
300 words per minute, and those two speeds give the
1.4 hours and 2.4 hours above.
Because time is words divided by speed, an even range of speeds produces an
uneven range of times, so 1.8 hours sits nearer the fast end of that
range than the middle of it.
If it were a paperback
Roughly 72–101 pages.
Words per printed page is a typesetting convention, not a measurement — it moves with trim size, type size and leading. The range above assumes 250–350 words a page. Friends Illuminated publishes no print edition of this book; the figure is here only because pages are a more familiar size than words.
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About This Edition
Elizabeth Collins was born Elizabeth Ballinger on the fourth of the First month, 1755, in Burlington County, New Jersey — a weakly child not expected to live. She was put out as an apprentice in childhood, married John Mason at eighteen, and was a widow about four years later. In 1778 she married Job Collins and settled at Upper Evesham, where she lived the rest of her life. She began to appear in the ministry around the age of twenty-four and was in due course recorded a minister by her Monthly Meeting.
Her book is quieter than the great travelling journals of the eighteenth century, and it is the better for it. She writes about the work she was given and the cost of doing it: the long rides through the Jerseys and into Virginia to Hopewell, the crossing to New York and Long Island, the repeated visits to Cape May, the meetings that opened and the meetings that did not. She was in Philadelphia during the yellow fever epidemic of 1793.
The bereavements are relentless, and she does not dress them up. There is a chapter in which she sits down deliberately to count her mercies, and the reader understands why she needed to. She lived to see the Hicksite Separation of 1827–28 divide the meeting she had served for half a century, and she died in 1831. The Testimony of Upper Evesham Monthly Meeting concerning her closes the volume.
A large part of the text is her own first-person journal, plain and unliterary. Around it are gathered letters — hers and others’ — which are printed here in their original language, set apart on the page so the reader can see where a document begins.
This edition brings spelling and punctuation into current usage, lightens archaic verb forms, and divides the longest sentences so her meaning arrives whole. Her Quaker vocabulary remains hers, and Friends’ dating by numbered months has been kept with the modern month supplied in brackets. Scripture references have been added and linked to the King James text; the persons and places she names have been linked to encyclopedic articles.
