An Account of the Convincement of Margaret Lucas
The first-person account of Margaret Lucas of Leek in Staffordshire (1701–1769) — orphaned young, raised a zealous churchwoman, and drawn to Quaker truth as a girl against the sustained fury of her uncle and aunt. Written in the plain, searching voice of personal experience, it traces the inward struggle, the costly taking-up of the plain language, and the settled peace she found at last in obedience to the Light. A modern English edition with linked scripture and historical references.
- One of the most affecting convincement narratives in the Friends' Library
- A young woman's steadfastness against relentless family opposition
- EPUB format
This edition
Read itE-book · EPUB
- Time to read1.7 hours
- Length23,746 words
- Files1 EPUB, DRM-free
How we get 1.7 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 1.7 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 1.3 hours to 2.3 hours.
What is in this edition
| Modernized text | 20,545 words |
|---|---|
| Introduction, chapter summaries and notes written for this edition | 3,201 words |
| Total | 23,746 words |
The introduction, the chapter summaries and the notes on people, places and unfamiliar terms were written for this edition. They are 3,201 of the 23,746 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
1.3 hours and 2.3 hours above.
Because time is words divided by speed, an even range of speeds produces an
uneven range of times, so 1.7 hours sits nearer the fast end of that
range than the middle of it.
If it were a paperback
Roughly 68–95 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
Margaret Lucas was born in London in 1701 and orphaned as a child, sent to be raised by an uncle and aunt in Leek, Staffordshire. She grew up a devout and zealous member of the Church of England — a constant attender at every service and saint’s day, a young woman who loved the bells and the pew and the offered prayer. Then the forms began to fail her. In a season of deep spiritual hunger she heard the Quakers preach, and found among them a satisfaction her old devotions had never given.
What follows is the heart of her story: not a quiet conversion but a long, buffeting struggle against the whole weight of a respectable household set on turning her back. Parsons were sent to reason and mock; her uncle raged; her aunt, in unguarded passion, struck at her with a fireshovel and a candlestick, and once pinched and held her arm so long in the shop that the doctor feared she would lose it. Through every threat and blow Lucas was, in her own telling, “mercifully kept steady in soul,” believing herself in the way of her duty.
Her account is prized because it is so honest about the cost — the tenderest temptation was not her aunt’s cruelty but her only brother’s loving letter offering her a home in London if she would give up the Friends. She answers it, and never hears from him on the subject again. The second part of the narrative traces a hidden call and her final yielding to it.
This edition gently modernizes Lucas’s eighteenth-century prose for present-day readers: spelling and punctuation brought into present usage, the archaic verb forms lightened, and the longest run-on sentences divided for clarity — while her plain Quaker speech and the searching intimacy of her voice remain her own. Scripture references have been added and linked to the King James text, and the persons, places, and events behind the narrative linked to encyclopedic articles.
