Deborah Bell

Deborah Bell was born Deborah Winn in 1689. She was convinced of Quaker truth as a young woman, made her first journeys in the service of Truth in 1707, and came into the work of the ministry the following year, in 1708. She was then nineteen. Almost everything that is known of the thirty years that followed comes from her own short journal.

The journal is a travelling record, and it moves. It carries her north into Scotland in 1709, through Wales around the time of her marriage in 1710–1711, and into the southern counties before her removal to London. From London she crossed repeatedly to Ireland between 1715 and 1720 — the Irish Sea passage being, for an English minister of that generation, the ordinary hard labour of the calling rather than an adventure. She continued travelling in later visits as far as 1737, the year before her death.

Woven among the journeys are her letters on women’s preaching and the way of Truth. These are the most deliberate writing in the book: a quiet, well-grounded defence of her own calling, offered by a woman who had spent three decades exercising it and who evidently expected to be asked. She argues from scripture and from experience, and she does not raise her voice.

Her journal was published in 1762, a quarter of a century after she died, and the volume is framed by others’ words as well as her own. A biographical preface sets the outward facts in order. Her husband’s testimony bears witness to the character of her ministry and gives a moving account of her last illness and her death in 1738. Together, preface, journal, letters, and testimony preserve the portrait of a faithful public Friend whose service was measured not in drama but in miles and meetings and unwearied constancy — which is, in the end, what most of the ministry actually consisted of, and what most journals of the period are too eventful to show.