The Life of Mary Dudley
Mary Dudley was born Mary Stokes in Bristol in 1750 and raised in the Established Church. She went among the Methodists in her late teens and was moved by them, but found that something in her still wanted what the preaching could not give. She found it in the silence of a Friends' meeting, and in 1773, at twenty-three, she joined the Society. She married Robert Dudley, removed to Ireland, and was called into the ministry — a service that held her for fifty years. She travelled through Holland and Germany with Sarah and Robert Grubb, through France in the year the Revolution turned, to Dunkirk and Guernsey, into Scotland, Wales and the north of England, and again and again through the four provinces of Ireland. She also buried a great deal: her husband, her son, and two of her daughters, one of them Hannah, at twenty-five. Her later years were spent in constant illness and constant work, and she was still writing an epistle to the Yearly Meeting months before she died in the ninth month of 1823. This edition gathers the life compiled by her daughter Elizabeth Dudley from her own memoranda and letters, with the testimonies of Southwark Monthly Meeting and of the Quarterly Meeting for London and Middlesex concerning her, in clear modern English.
- Fully modernized English — every long sentence broken, every inversion untangled
- 1,675-word editorial introduction placing her fifty years of travel in context
- 23 chapters with argument summaries, plus a full linked table of contents
- Her own memoranda and letters, with the testimonies given forth concerning her in 1824
- 441 linked Scripture and reference notes throughout
- EPUB format
This edition
Read itE-book · EPUB
- Time to read6.7 hours
- Length95,117 words
- Files1 EPUB, DRM-free
How we get 6.7 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 6.7 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 5.3 hours to 9.1 hours.
What is in this edition
| Modernized text | 93,491 words |
|---|---|
| Introduction, chapter summaries and notes written for this edition | 1,626 words |
| Total | 95,117 words |
The introduction, the chapter summaries and the notes on people, places and unfamiliar terms were written for this edition. They are 1,626 of the 95,117 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
5.3 hours and 9.1 hours above.
Because time is words divided by speed, an even range of speeds produces an
uneven range of times, so 6.7 hours sits nearer the fast end of that
range than the middle of it.
If it were a paperback
Roughly 272–380 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
She was born Mary Stokes in the city of Bristol on the eighth of the sixth month, 1750, the daughter of Joseph and Mary Stokes. She was a quick, lively, much-admired girl, fond of reading and of writing verse, brought up strictly in the worship of the Establishment and allowed nearly every amusement outside it. She was, by her own account, dissatisfied in the middle of all of it.
The search
She went to hear the Methodists and was reached by them — she says she felt more of divine impression there than at any previous season. She joined their Society. She also went among the Dissenters, and was for a while much taken with the Baptists. None of it settled her. What she wanted was an inward and spiritual life, and what she kept finding instead were forms. “I felt a want,” she wrote, “a vacuum unfilled with that good I was thirsting after.”
She began going into Friends’ meetings, and there, in the silence, her spirit fed. In 1773, in the twenty-third year of her age, she joined the Religious Society of Friends. Her old companions ridiculed her for it; her nearest relations were mortified by the plain dress; she went on anyway.
Fifty years of travelling
She married Robert Dudley and removed to Ireland, settling first at Clonmel and afterwards at Limerick and Waterford, and was called into the ministry. What follows in this book is one of the most sustained records of Quaker travelling ministry we have from a woman of that generation.
In 1788 she went with Sarah and Robert Grubb through Holland and Germany, and home again through France. In 1792 she was at Dunkirk and Guernsey. That same year took her into the north of England and Scotland; the next into north and south Wales, Bristol and Lancashire. In 1794 she wrote to the French prisoners at Kinsale. She went through Ulster and Connaught, sat in the families of Waterford, attended London Yearly Meeting, and returned to Ireland again and again — Wexford, Cork, Munster, Leinster, the whole of it, for thirty years.
What it cost
The book does not hide the price. Her husband fell ill in 1797 and died in 1807. Her son died. Her daughter Hannah died in the third month of 1810, in the twenty-sixth year of her age, and a memorial of her closes this volume. Mary Dudley herself was ill for most of her adult life — there are years in these pages in which she can barely leave Bristol — and she kept going out anyway, into Kent and Surrey and Sussex, into Essex and Yorkshire, into Southwark, until the last illness took her.
The close
She died in the ninth month of 1823, in the seventy-fourth year of her age. The epistle she wrote to the Yearly Meeting a few months earlier is here. So are the testimonies concerning her, given forth by Southwark Monthly Meeting and by the Quarterly Meeting for London and Middlesex in 1824, and her daughter Elizabeth’s preface, written at Peckham in the eleventh month of 1824.
About this edition
Every sentence has been rebuilt for a modern reader. Her vocabulary of conviction — Truth, the Seed, First-day, the numbered months — is bracketed on first use and then left alone, because translating it would translate her out of the book. Four hundred and forty-one Scripture and reference links are set into the text; every Scripture reference was checked against the King James text rather than recalled, and every person and place link was checked by hand.
