Memoir of Ann Crowley
The memoranda of Ann Crowley (1765–1826) of Shillingford and Uxbridge, who insisted she was not writing a journal at all — only a few notes set down because gratitude would not let her stay silent. What she produced instead is one of the most candid accounts of early convincement in the literature: a girl visited in childhood by what she called the gentle reproofs of instruction, a young woman who spent years unwilling to speak, and finally a minister who travelled the Isle of Man, Wales, Cornwall, Devon, Kent and the north. With two appendices. A modern English edition with linked scripture and historical references.
- Nine chapters of a travelling minister's own memoranda, 1765–1824
- Nearly five thousand miles by horseback and chaise, set down plainly
- With two appendices: her sister Rebecca's last illness and the martyrdom of William Leddra
- EPUB format
About This Edition
Ann Crowley was born on the eighth of the fifth month, 1765, at Shillingford in Oxfordshire, one of the eight daughters of William and Catherine Crowley. Her father was a maltster and mealman. She opens her own account by disclaiming it: she has “no expectation of leaving any thing that will bear the appellation of a journal,” and writes only because she cannot manifest her gratitude by staying silent. The disclaimer is worth taking seriously, because it explains the shape of the book. This is not a travel narrative with a spiritual gloss. It is a sustained reckoning with grace, into which the travelling occasionally intrudes.
What she remembers first is being very young and finding that certain things quietly stopped her — “the gentle reproofs of instruction,” felt before she had any name for them. She became aware at sixteen of a call to the ministry, and her father died the year after. Then, characteristically, she did nothing about it for a long time. The chapters that follow are unusually honest about that delay, and about the seasons of humiliation that punctuated it. Friends’ memoirs of this period are often written to edify; hers is written to account for itself, which is a different and harder thing.
The travelling, when it comes, is substantial. She toured Wales in 1794 in company with Mary Stevens and George and Sarah Dillwyn. Between 1795 and 1799 she lost four members of her family, moved the household, and covered something close to five thousand miles on horseback and by chaise, including the Isle of Man. The years from 1799 to 1806 took her through Cornwall and Devon, the whole of the London and Middlesex Quarterly Meeting, Surrey, Sussex and Kent, and then north. She names the places and the meetings, and this edition restores every one of them.
She kept writing after her strength failed. The closing memoranda of 1821 to 1824 were set down, she says, with a pen she could barely hold, between illnesses of thirteen weeks and more. She died on the tenth of the fourth month, 1826, in great quietness, having said the evening before that if she were gone in the morning there would be cause to rejoice.
Two appendices are printed with the memoir, both of them chosen by her editors to answer something in the text. The first is the fuller account of her sister Rebecca, who lingered ten weeks past the day her doctors gave her up, written by the sisters who sat with her; the memoir proper disposes of it in a single sentence. The second has nothing to do with Ann Crowley at all. In the sixth chapter she compares her own comfortable sufferings — a chaise, a bed at the end of the day — with those of the first generation of Friends who were dragged to prison for the same work. William Leddra, hanged at Boston in 1661, is what she meant, and his last letter is here so the reader can measure the comparison for themselves.
This Friends Illuminated edition presents the complete text in modern English, with archaic constructions resolved, scripture references linked, and the people, places and meetings of Ann Crowley’s England identified for the present-day reader.
