ABSTRACT
Religious convictions, gender expectations, and radical politics all played a part in the family history and early life of Mary Morris. Her ancestors embraced Quaker beliefs, and their descendants struggled to reconcile religious radicalism with social respectability, as tensions developed between Quakerism and Quakerliness. As a prosperous and educated provincial woman, she gained a regional reputation for her beauty and defended her beliefs in polished poetics. Furthermore, she described herself as an artist, resisted a Quaker authority, and wrote a satirical autobiography as a form of radical self-representation. As her religious verses and her letter written in 1765 show, Morris resisted family and religious authorities and struggled to define her own identity. By interacting with Anglicans like Anna Seward and her clerical adversary, Morris tested the boundaries of religious toleration. By actively constructing her own identity, she demonstrated how she, as a woman, could be a needlework artist, political commentator, religious disputant, and social change agent.
