In March 1749 the young Elizabeth Bennis had her first encounter with Methodism when she witnessed the arrival in Limerick of the first Wesleyan preacher to visit the city. Elizabeth converted to Methodism shortly afterwards and, despite criticism from family and community, rapidly assumed a leadership role within her local congregation. Energetic, intelligent and zealous, she went on to become one of the most influential of John Wesley’s Irish correspondents, an advocate of Methodism not only in Limerick but in Waterford and elsewhere in Munster, and, through her contacts with John Stretton, the Irish-born apostle of Methodism to Newfoundland, had a hand in the establishment of Methodism in North America.Immediately following her conversion, Elizabeth began a journal which she would keep for the next thirty years. Intended primarily as a record of the author’s spiritual condition and progress towards ‘perfect holiness’, the journal also details her role as wife and mother, her relationships with her husband, children, mother-in-law and friends, her involvement in the family business and her contribution, and by extension that of women generally, to the emerging Methodist movement in Ireland. Elizabeth Bennis’s journal opens a window onto the daily life and inner consciousness of a middle-class woman in eighteenth-century Ireland, and onto the world which she inhabited. It is at once an intimate and intensely involving account of a remarkable woman, and a major addition to the sources for the history of women, religion and domestic life in this period.
Rosemary Raughter is an independent historian. She has lectured and written a number of articles on eighteenth-century female philanthropy and on women in early Irish Methodism, and is the editor of Religious women and their history: breaking the silence (2005), a collection of essays on Irishwomen’s involvement in institutional religion over the past two hundred years.
- 55a Spruce Avenue
- Stillorgan Industrial Park
- Blackrock
- Co. Dublin
- IRL