In 1712, nineteen-year-old Jane Fenn left her home, family, and friends in London to obey an inner voice that said “Go to Pennsylvania!” After arriving in Philadelphia, she was soon cast into debtors’ prison for refusing to sign an indenture dictated by the man who had arranged her passage.
Redeemed by a group of Quakers from Plymouth County (Pa.) who wished to employ her as a schoolteacher, she spent three years in their community and began to absorb their teachings and their ways.
It documents not only her own religious experience, but also the practices of the Quaker communities of early Pennsylvania, and, especially, the importance of the networks of female relationships around which women’s lives revolved.
In 1738, she married Joseph Hoskins (d. 1773), a prosperous Quaker merchant of Chester, Pa. On her life and the significance of her narrative, see Michele Lise Tarter, “Jane Fenn Hoskens,” Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 200: American Women Prose Writers to 1820, ed.
187–194; and Rebecca Larson, Daughters of Light: Quaker Women Preaching and Prophesying in the Colonies and Abroad, 1700–1775 (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1999).