Elizabeth Fry. From Elmer Cleveland Adams and Warren Dunham
                                Foster, 
                                    Heroines of Modern Progress.

Elizabeth Fry

Milestones

1780
Birth
To Quaker parents
1800
Marriage
Joseph Fry, a Quaker banker
1801-1822
Family
Gives birth to 11 children
1811
Vocation
Becomes Quaker Minister
1817
Vocation
Begins organized work with women prisoners
1845
Death
since 2002
Memorial
Featured on Bank of England £5 note

The Cleaned-Up Version of a Great Philanthropist: Elizabeth FryRead more...

Julia Fuller

During the early decades of the nineteenth century, Elizabeth Fry was one of most famous women in London and her charitable influence extended across the United Kingdom and Europe. The first publicly recognized female philanthropist, she organized Ladies' Committees that fought to reform the appalling conditions of prisons. Beginning with the female inmates at Newgate Prison, she pioneered a system of discipline that aimed to rehabilitate criminals as productive members of society. Lionized in paintings as well as biographies, ubiquitously depicted in her Plain Quaker attire and often shown reading the Bible before a group of lower-class listeners, she built upon the legend of her heroic entry into the notoriously riotous women's quarters at Newgate. Contemporary collected biographies virtually canonized Elizabeth Fry, associating her with heroines such as Florence Nightingale, Grace Darling and the Maid of Saragossa as well as saints of old. However, more recent exposes, beginning with June Rose's biography published in 1980, reveal complex qualities in Elizabeth Fry that the nineteenth century biographies rather conspicuously suppressed.

Reading through the lens of June Rose's revealing 1980 biography to investigate revisionary practices in several contemporary versions of Elizabeth Fry's life.