from Memoir of the Life of Elizabeth Fry, with Extracts from Her Journal and Letters, ed. Katherine Fry and Rachel Elizabeth Cresswell, 2 vols (London: Charles Gilpin; John Hatchard and Son, 1847), vol. 1, ch. 9.

Elizabeth Fry was a member of the large and well-to-do Quaker family of Gurneys of Norwich. As a child she was nervous and a slow learner, and experienced a spiritual conversion in 1798; her strong religious feeling would bolster her life of social activism, often verging on feminism. She was active in a variety of charities for the poor, campaigned for vaccination against smallpox, and in 1813 found her most famous calling after visiting the women's side of Newgate Prison. The conditions there appalled her and she set about improving them with the help of women associates, usually supported by their men family members. The biography or hagiography of Elizabeth Fry celebrates her while quietly disclosing the emotional and psychological tensions she suffered for engaging in social work and activism of kinds usually closed to women and often disapproved of as unfeminine, but yet exploited by numbers of nineteenth-century women as a way to enter the public sphere.