Memoir of the Life, Travels, and Religious Experience of Martha Routh
The memoir of Martha Routh (1743–1817), an English Quaker minister who left a Nottingham schoolroom to cross the Atlantic twice and travel thousands of miles in the ministry across America between 1794 and 1805. Compiled chiefly from her own journal and first gathered in The Friends' Library, it follows a woman who dreaded the work and did it anyway — through storms at sea, sickness on the road, and meeting after meeting in the towns and clearings of the young republic. Modernized for present-day readers with her Quaker vocabulary preserved and scripture and historical references linked throughout.
- Twenty chapters compiled from her own journal, following two Atlantic crossings and thousands of miles of travelling ministry through England, Ireland, and America
- Her account of the great American journey of 1794–1805, from New England to the Carolinas and back across the ocean
- EPUB format
This edition
Read itE-book · EPUB
- Time to read4.7 hours
- Length66,590 words
- Files1 EPUB, DRM-free
How we get 4.7 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 4.7 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 3.7 hours to 6.3 hours.
What is in this edition
| Modernized text | 61,497 words |
|---|---|
| Introduction, chapter summaries and notes written for this edition | 5,093 words |
| Total | 66,590 words |
The introduction, the chapter summaries and the notes on people, places and unfamiliar terms were written for this edition. They are 5,093 of the 66,590 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
3.7 hours and 6.3 hours above.
Because time is words divided by speed, an even range of speeds produces an
uneven range of times, so 4.7 hours sits nearer the fast end of that
range than the middle of it.
If it were a paperback
Roughly 190–266 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.
- Secure checkout by Stripe
- Instant download
- 7-day money-back guarantee
About This Edition
Martha Routh was born at Stourbridge in 1743 and might have spent her life as a schoolmistress. She kept a girls’ school at Nottingham, and for years resisted what she felt pressing on her — the concern to leave it, and the settled life around it, for the road. When she gave way at last, she gave way completely. Between 1794 and 1805 she crossed the Atlantic twice, once outbound and once home, and in the years between she travelled thousands of miles in the ministry across the eastern United States, from the meetings of New England down through Pennsylvania and the South and out to the edge of settlement, sitting with Friends in every kind of place a meeting could be held.
What makes the memoir worth reading is that she is honest about the fear. She records the storms of the outbound passage plainly — the ship laboring, the water coming in, her own inability to pretend she was not afraid — and she records the smaller dreads too: the meeting she did not want to appoint, the family visit she shrank from, the long stretches when she felt, in her own phrase, low and stripped. She was not a natural traveller made bold by temperament. She was an ordinary, frightened woman who believed she was required to go, and went.
This Friends Illuminated edition presents the whole in twenty chapters, compiled from her own journal and narrative of her travels, gently modernized for present-day readers. Her Quaker vocabulary is preserved throughout — Truth, the Seed, openings, concern, meetings for worship and discipline — and quoted letters and speech keep their plain-speech “thee” and “thou” as the testimony they are. Scripture and historical references are linked so that a reader today can follow her across an ocean and a continent without losing the thread.
