Abstract

Elizabeth Ashbridge, always an outsider in search of a spiritual home, recorded a quite unconventional spiritual autobiography for eighteenth-century Friends. Untrained by the Quakers’ codes of Quietism, she bypassed cultural conditioning and revived the primitive Christianity of earliest Friends. Her syncretic religious experience—reaching back to seventeenth-century practices in order to infuse Light and enthusiasm into eighteenth-century ministry—awakens the old in the new. As a Spiritual Mother and a Public Friend, she inscribes her autobiography of suffering and omits her narrative of affluence, ultimately leaving her literary legacy of spiritual reform and mystical renewal for succeeding generations.