The Life of Jane Hoskens

Jane Hoskens was born in London in the first month of 1693/4 — March, by the reckoning then in use — and brought up strictly in the Church of England. She was cheerful, musical, fond of singing and of company, and by her own account not much troubled about her soul until, in her sixteenth year, a sickness brought her close to death. Lying in that extremity she made a covenant: if she were spared, the rest of her days would be given to God’s service. Something answered it. If I restore you, go to Pennsylvania. She recovered, and promptly forgot.

She did not stay forgotten. The opening came back, and came back again, until she told her parents she meant to go to America. Her father’s response has survived because she wrote it down: The girl has a mind to turn Quaker. She had at that point never met a Friend and knew nothing of their principles. He forbade it. She obeyed him, and was miserable, and in the end went anyway.

What follows is one of the most precise accounts we have of what it meant to be a poor young woman in a world of passage money and indentures. She crossed in 1712 on the credit of a Welshman named Robert Davis, who agreed to pay her fare and wait for repayment on her word alone, without note or bond. Once they reached Philadelphia he changed his mind and pressed her to sign indentures binding her four years to a stranger, at a profit to himself. She refused. He had her confined by legal process. Friends offered to pay him off and she declined that too, being unwilling to be bought out of one obligation into another, and convinced that Philadelphia was not where she was meant to settle. The matter resolved itself when four families at Plymouth wanted a sober young woman to teach their children and paid her passage money themselves.

She taught school, first at Plymouth and then at Haverford, and among Friends she was convinced. Then comes the part of the book that is hardest and best. She believed she was called to speak in meeting, and for a long time she would not. She had herself spoken a great deal against women appearing in that way. She pleaded unfitness. She stopped going to meetings altogether rather than face what she expected to be required of her there, and went through what she calls a time of refining — days and nights of godly sorrow she said were beyond her ability to set down. Her neighbours treated her with great tenderness and had no idea what was wrong. When she finally stood up she spoke, she says, like a child, a few words only, and sat down in the enjoyment of heavenly life.

From about 1710 she lived in the household of David and Grace Lloyd at Chester — David Lloyd being the Welsh-born lawyer who served as Pennsylvania’s first Attorney General and fourteen years as Chief Justice of its Supreme Court. It is one of the warmest passages in the book. They gave her liberty to travel in the ministry, and when he died she wrote simply that in him she had lost a father and a sure friend. Her account of her own years of service contains a sentence worth sitting with: she never was more easy and contented in mind, with regard to outward things, in any station of life, than when she was a servant.

The later chapters are travel. With Elizabeth Levis and others she went through the colonies — New Castle, Kent and Sussex on Delaware, the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, the Jersies, Long Island, Nantucket, Rhode Island, New England as far east as Salem — and then by sea to Barbadoes, and later to Britain and Ireland. She was shipwrecked, becalmed, lamed at Nantucket and laid up at Boston for nine weeks, and seized on Long Island with a clouding of her sight. She records the storms in the language of the ninety-third Psalm, which was evidently in her head at sea: the Lord is stronger than the noise of many waters.

This is a short book, and it does not try to be a great one. It is the plain account of a woman who was given something to do that she did not want, argued with it for years, and then did it for the rest of her life.

This Friends Illuminated edition presents the complete text in modern English, with the long inverted sentences of the 1771 Philadelphia printing resolved, scripture references linked, and the people, places and meetings of Hoskens’s Pennsylvania identified for the present-day reader.