"Margaret Fell was an inspiring and practical leader in the early Quaker movement in 17th-century England. Remembered as the wife of George Fox, her writings have been largely forgotten. This book brings them to life again, with excerpts and reflections structured around the four testimonies that have continued to shape Quaker witness to this day: Simplicity, Truth, Equality and Peace. To do this, Joanna Godfrey Wood follows each passage with a modern adaptation of Fell's words and then explores her own personal responses from a 21st-century perspective. We are left with a sense of a strong and beautiful bridge linking past and present."--Amazon.com.

The story of the Quakers starts in Europe: Lancacashire, England, in the summer of 1652 when two horsemen blundered into the quicksands of Morecambe Bay. One of the horsemen was George Fox. The accident was see by Margaret Fell, owner of Swarthmoor Hall. From this meeting grew the Religious Society of Friends, and out of the Quaker history, Jan de Hartog has created this epic novel.

"Focusing on the formative period of Quakerism in seventeenth-century England and the role of one vigorous and authoritative woman, this study offers new insights into the religious, social, and family life of Margaret Fell. The book probes Fell's pivotal role, in close relation to George Fox, in the architecture of the early Quaker church order. It investigates Fell's role in the development of the Quaker women's meetings, a unique seventeenth-century Quaker institution. It also offers a fresh historical perspective of this socially prominent sectarian woman in terms of her family relationships, the household economic unit, the neighbourhood network, and the wider sectarian religious community that extended far beyond her home, Swarthmoor Hall in rural north-west Lancashire. The author marshals evidence to argue that it was in keeping with Margaret Fell's social status, permanence of place, personality, and skills learned in the domestic sphere, that she was a co-leader, along with Ge