Joan Whitrowe

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

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

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. 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. 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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