ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the female missionary narrative and character through analysing the early nineteenth-century biographies of the missionary wives Ann Judson and Harriet Newell. The chapter argues that, while biographers attempted to control the characterisation of the woman missionary, radical aspects of the character emerged from the memoirs, especially due to their autobiographical nature. On the one hand, the women were domesticated and shown displaying appropriate feminine piety, especially in their passive, self-sacrificial deaths, which biographers presented using the tropes of deathbed witnesses in spiritual biography. On the other hand, their missionary marriages, their taking on of an active, public missionary role and their heroic martyrdom revealed them to be highly radical, complicating understandings of Christian femininity. The chapter also explores how these missionary women presented themselves in their writing using the familiar conventions of conversion accounts or other forms of religious life writing to reveal how evangelical women experienced their faith, and how emotions and female relationships structured their religious practice.
