Reader, She Didn't Marry Him. She, an illiterate working woman, leading figure of a religious sect, commanded the devotion of many followers, was persecuted and imprisoned for her beliefs - yet who today has heard of Ann Lee, the female Messiah and founding mother of the Shakers, branded alternatively a witch and a revolutionary? Trendy furniture and a zealous adherence to celibacy is what most of us might associate with the Shakers. Lee's relative obscurity is certainly due to her gender, but also to the decline in Shakerism itself. Richard Francis announces at the beginning of his book, with something of a fanfare, that he will rescue Ann Lee from her unjust obscurity and put her on the historical map, restoring her to her rightful place amongst the canon of influential women.
Ann Lee's story is indeed a fascinating one and she lived an extraordinary life. Born in Manchester in 1736, daughter of a blacksmith, she worked for many years as a cook at the local infirmary and after a term in a lunatic ward after the death of several of her children, received the message that she was Ann the Word, the female manifestation of Christ. (Or as one of her followers would have it: If I ever saw the image of Christ displayed in human clay, I saw it in Mother Ann).
Abandoning her husband and embracing celibacy, she took over as leader of the Shaking Quakers, whose followers had rejected the tenets of quakerism to found their own sect. The principle form of Shaker worship was wild dancing, singing and, of course great shaking and trembling. Imprisoned for her beliefs in England, Ann set sail for the Americas in 1774 with a band of devoted adherents, and embarked on the crusade of conversion that she had glimpsed in her visions. For many years, she travelled in harsh circumstances, converting about a thousand people and visiting dozens of towns and settlements where she was frequently greeted with hostility. During her lifetime she became adept at confronting mobs, defusing aggression and defying the forces of law and order.
Despite the richness of the material of her life, Richard Francis has produced a rather bland biography - though doubtless he was hampered by the lack of first-hand material by his subject. We have no inkling of Ann's inner life, her conflicts or dilemmas, her sense of mission and the contradiction between that and her womanhood. The result is that Ann remains elusive, seen through other eyes - mostly those of her followers - and her presence is as insubstantial as a shadow on a piece of ancient parchment. Francis does succeed in giving a flavour of the harsh life of the early Shakers, their swings from agony to ecstasy, the difficulty of their lives as pioneers both in the Americas and in the spiritual realm. Often social pariahs because of the violent and ecstatic nature of their worship, they were also suspect because of the sect's British origins, this suspicion being greatly intensified at the time of the war of independence.
And Ann's visions and prophecies of course laid her open to the charge of being a witch. Somehow the narrative only sparks into life spasmodically - the description of Ann's early life, the tumult in 18th-century England and the rising of working people through food riots and cults like Shakerism. These are vividly described, as are both the chaotic scenes of worship and the rough and tumble of the mobs that pursue Ann all her life. As Francis also astutely points out. our latter-day faux idealisation of Shaker life via its furniture and crafts obscures the fact that, in its bid to replace family life and procreation with spiritual life, it often destroyed families as children were farmed out after conversion.
However, Francis's writing style is at times nothing short of bizarre, marked by modernisms and asides of his own invention. The most extreme example being this description of one of the Shaker elders: "As we have seen, William was known to be fast on the trigger as far as the waterworks were concerned". This, I hasten to add, refers to the man's tendency to weep. This strange and at times inadvertently comical style reduces the potential richness of Ann Lee's story and fails to do it justice.
Katrina Goldstone is a researcher and critic. She has written and lectured on attitudes to ethnic minorities