Memoirs of Ruth Follows
Ruth Follows of Castle Donington in Leicestershire (1718–1809) was a minister among Friends for sixty years. She travelled the length of England, over the mountains of Wales, north into Scotland, and twice into Ireland — the second time in her mid-sixties. What makes her Memoirs unusual is the letters: away from home for months at a stretch, she wrote to her husband George and to her children from every stage of every journey. The result is a portrait of the travelling ministry from the inside, not a polished retrospect but the thing itself, sent off in haste with the horses waiting. A modern English edition with linked scripture and historical references.
- Sixty years in the travelling ministry, told largely in her own letters home
- England, Wales, Scotland, and twice across the sea to Ireland
- EPUB format
This edition
Read itE-book · EPUB
- Time to read2.6 hours
- Length36,510 words
- Files1 EPUB, DRM-free
How we get 2.6 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 2.6 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 2 hours to 3.5 hours.
What is in this edition
| Modernized text | 32,829 words |
|---|---|
| Introduction, chapter summaries and notes written for this edition | 3,681 words |
| Total | 36,510 words |
The introduction, the chapter summaries and the notes on people, places and unfamiliar terms were written for this edition. They are 3,681 of the 36,510 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
2 hours and 3.5 hours above.
Because time is words divided by speed, an even range of speeds produces an
uneven range of times, so 2.6 hours sits nearer the fast end of that
range than the middle of it.
If it were a paperback
Roughly 104–146 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
Ruth Follows was born in 1718, the daughter of Richard and Ruth Alcock, and married George Follows about the age of twenty-three. She was drawn into the ministry young and remained in it until she was too old to ride. She died on the third of the Fourth month, 1809, at the age of ninety-one, and these Memoirs — a Monthly Meeting testimony, her own brief memoranda, and a great many of her letters — were printed in that same year.
Her first Irish visit, in 1761–62, nearly killed her: she was taken dangerously ill at Edenderry and again at Portarlington, far from home, among people she scarcely knew. She went back twenty years later. In between she passed through a close inward conflict at Devizes, London, and Norwich; crossed the Welsh mountains; worked the southern counties and the city; went down into Cornwall and Devon; visited Coalbrookdale; and travelled the northern counties and Scotland. Her companions on the road included Elizabeth Fletcher and, later, Martha Routh.
The letters are the heart of the book. Six years of her later life are told in nothing else. Writing from an inn at Waterford or a Friend’s house at Coalbrookdale, she reports the state of the meetings, asks after the farm, worries about her sons, and now and then says plainly how tired she is. It is a kind of document the eighteenth century produced very little of and preserved even less.
Accordingly, this edition treats the letters differently from the narrative. The narrative and memoranda are modernized: spelling and punctuation brought into current usage, archaic verb forms lightened, the longest sentences divided. The letters are printed in their own language, set apart on the page, with the plain speech intact and only the obvious damage of old printing repaired. When Ruth Follows writes to her husband, the reader hears her exactly as he did.
Friends’ dating by numbered months has been kept, with the modern month supplied in brackets; her lifetime spans the calendar reform of 1752, and the brackets follow the reckoning in force at the time of writing. Scripture references have been added and linked to the King James text, and the persons and places she names linked to encyclopedic articles.
