Selected Writings & Journals
Elizabeth Fry (1780–1845) — the Quaker minister whose visits to Newgate made her the most famous woman in Europe and the mother of modern prison reform — in her own journals and letters, curated from the two-volume Memoir of 1847 into sixteen chronological chapters: her awakening under William Savery, the plain Friend's path, the Newgate school and association, the female convict ships, the ruin of the Fry bank, and her missions to the prisons and courts of the Continent. A modern English edition with her letters preserved verbatim and linked scripture and historical references.
- Her journals and letters in sixteen chronological chapters, from Earlham to Newgate and the courts of Europe
- The founding of the Newgate school and Ladies' Association, the convict ships, and the fall of the Fry bank — in her own words
- EPUB format
This edition
Read itE-book · EPUB
- Time to read1.8 hours
- Length25,836 words
- Files1 EPUB, DRM-free
How we get 1.8 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 1.8 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 1.4 hours to 2.5 hours.
What is in this edition
| Modernized text | 24,792 words |
|---|---|
| Introduction, chapter summaries and notes written for this edition | 1,044 words |
| Total | 25,836 words |
The introduction, the chapter summaries and the notes on people, places and unfamiliar terms were written for this edition. They are 1,044 of the 25,836 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
1.4 hours and 2.5 hours above.
Because time is words divided by speed, an even range of speeds produces an
uneven range of times, so 1.8 hours sits nearer the fast end of that
range than the middle of it.
If it were a paperback
Roughly 74–103 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
Elizabeth Fry was born Elizabeth Gurney at Norwich in 1780, a shy and fearful child in a wealthy Quaker banking family whose religion sat lightly upon it. At seventeen she heard the American Friend William Savery preach, wept, and wrote in her journal that she had at last felt there is a God. From that day her diary becomes the record of a soul under instruction: the gaieties given up, the plain dress and plain speech taken on, marriage to the London merchant Joseph Fry, eleven children, and in 1811 the acknowledgment of her ministry by the Society of Friends.
Then came Newgate. In 1813 she saw the women’s wards — three hundred women and their children, the tried and untried together, cooking, washing, and fighting in the same narrow space. In 1817 she returned to found a school inside the prison, then an association of ladies who came in daily; the prisoners themselves voted to adopt her rules, and within months the yard that magistrates had called a den of wild beasts sat in ordered stillness while a Quaker matron read the Scriptures. In 1818 she became the first woman ever called to give evidence before a committee of the House of Commons. For a quarter of a century no convict ship carrying women sailed for New South Wales unvisited. In her last years she carried her concern to the prisons of France, Prussia, and Denmark, and pleaded her cause before kings.
This Friends Illuminated edition tells that story in her own words. Her journal entries form the spine of every chapter; her letters, and the letters written to her, are set off in bordered panels and left in their original language. The connecting narrative of her daughters’ 1847 Memoir has been condensed into brief modern editorial bridges. The private record is the deeper half of the book: the dread of fame, the buried children, the winter of 1828 when the failure of the Fry bank stripped her family of fortune and reputation, and the faith that held through all of it — obedience carried on in the middle of fear, year after year, until the fear wore out.
