Good Quaker Women, Tearful Sentimental Spectators, Readers, And Auditors

ISSN： 0144-0357

Source： Prose Studies, Vol.29, Iss.1, 2007-04, pp. : 73-85

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Abstract

In 1733, towards the end of the Long Restoration Period, the Quaker Joseph Besse published An Abstract of the Sufferings of the People Call'd Quakers, a book that came to be known as Besse's Book of Sufferings. This essay examines writings by four of the Restoration women memorialized by Besse, Dorothy Waugh, Katharine Evans, Mary Penington, and Barbara Blaugdone, arguing that, in different ways, their texts use a figure which might best be described as a 'sentimental spectator.' Using this figure to establish themselves as good women, and drawing on traditions developed from Foxe's Book of Martyrs, these writers are able to vindicate their actions without using the self-praise that would itself negate that goodness. Nevertheless, the process sometimes involves making a private incident public. Having shown key ways in which Quakers developed their tradition of 'sufferings' writing, the essay ends by suggesting some of the ways in which this Quaker device connects to the development of Restoration 'she tragedy,' and the use of the sentimental spectator as a significant protagonist in eighteenth-century fiction.