ABSTRACT
Amongst the many biographies of nascent Quakers on the shelves of the Quaker Center Bookshop in London, there is a standout work: In Search of Margaret Fell. This is not a historical account of Fell, rather it is a “reimagination” of her life, focusing on both her spiritual journey and love affair with George Fox. This work is hard to fit into a genre, as “story, rather than history,” author Judith Hayden sought to “find out not who she was, but who she might have been” by combining Fell’s story with her own personal journey.1 In so doing, Hayden found many similarities between her own life and that of the “Mother of Quakerism.” There are two main motifs in Hayden’s work. First, that Fell, an emotionally neglected, seventeenthcentury housewife, found both love and spiritual fulfillment in her relationship with George Fox and second, that Fell’s efforts in the religious community emboldened her to assume a feminist attitude about early modern women that was far beyond her time. The result is that Hayden combines the two main threads of Fell historiography: “nursing mother” of Quakerism and proto-feminist preacher.
