Joan Whitrowe
Bornc. 1631
United Kingdom
Diedc. 1707
United Kingdom

Joan Whitrowe (c. 1631–1707) was an English religious writer, visionary and polemicist.[1][2]

Personal life

She was married to Robert Whitrowe, a tailor, and had two children: Susannah (c. 1662–1677) and Jason (c. 1671–1677).[3]

She had blamed the apparently evil ways of her husband for the deaths of her children, seeing their deaths as a message from God to forsake domestic and worldly life for one of a prophet. In 1665, she went to London and Bristol to prophesise, and provided aid to victims of the London plague epidemic of that year.[3]

The work of God in a dying maid

The death of Susannah prompted her to write The work of God in a dying maid, being a short account of the dealings of the Lord with one Susannah Whitrow (1677).[4] The preface of this biography was written by prominent London Quaker Rebecca Travers, who visited by her bedside.[3][5]

Although not fully accurate, this biography became one of her most widely-read works and detailed Susannah's utterances against corruption, her initial reluctance but subsequent sympathy with Quakerism, and her praise of her mother's spiritual integrity.[3]

Initially a Quaker, she later broke with them, later saying she was not a member of any specific religious sect.[3][2] She later wrote a number of tracts on public issues.[6]

References

  1. ↑ King, Kathryn R. (2000). "Female agency and feminocentric romance". The Eighteenth Century. 41 (1): 63. ISSN 0193-5380. JSTOR 41467840.
  2. 1 2 MacDowell, Paula (1998). The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678-1730. Clarendon Press. p. 187–90. ISBN 978-0-19-818395-2.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 Mack, Phyllis (23 September 2004). "Whitrowe, Joan". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/45833. Retrieved 23 May 2021. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  4. ↑ Travers, Rebecca; Whitrowe, Joan; Martin, Ann; Sarah, Ellis (1677). The work of God in a dying maid being a short account of the dealings of the Lord with one Susannah Whitrow, about the age of fifteen years, and daughter of Robert Whitrow, inhabiting in Covent-garden in the county of Middlesex, together with her experimental confessions to the power and work of the Lord God, both in judgments and mercy to her soul / published for the warning and good of others who are in the same condition she was in before her sicknss.
  5. ↑ Pennington, Madeleine (4 March 2021). Quakers, Christ, and the Enlightenment. Oxford University Press. p. 35. ISBN 978-0-19-264841-9.
  6. ↑ Schwoerer, Lois G. (1986). "Women and the Glorious Revolution". Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies. 18 (2): 204. doi:10.2307/4050314. ISSN 0095-1390. JSTOR 4050314.
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