Mary Fletcher and the Family of Methodism

Abstract

The manuscript autobiography of Mary Fletcher, written in 1785, is structured into four parts, each addressing a different personal relationship that shapes her identity. It opens with a description of her turbulent childhood and her conversion to Methodism, continues with an account of her life within the female community at Leytonstone, and in the third part deals with the aftermath of Sarah Ryan’s death and the society’s relocation to Yorkshire. Her writing was interrupted by her husband’s death in August 1785, and from this point her continuous history is replaced by disconnected extracts from her diary and an appendix. Fletcher left instructions for Mary Tooth to pass her manuscripts to John Wesley’s biographer Henry Moore for publication after her death. Moore spliced together Fletcher’s autobiography with entries from her spiritual diary, included Her Thoughts on Communion with Happy Spirits, and ended the work with Tooth’s account of Fletcher’s final days and his own review of Fletcher’s character.¹ The text was published as The Life of Mrs. Mary Fletcher, Consort and Relict of the Rev. John Fletcher in 1817. Moore provided an insight into his own editorial practices in his introduction:

In compiling her life, I have left out much valuable matter, which was either contained, in substance, in other parts of these Memoirs, or were not of sufficient interest to appear in the Publication. I have also compressed what I thought was redundant, that the work might not be needlessly swelled. I have also thought it right to press her sentences into more conciseness.²