Introduction

Abstract who is Susanna Wesley? The quick and obvious response is John Wesley’s mother, the woman behind the founder of Methodism in eighteenth-century England. True as far as it goes, this answer nevertheless limits her appeal to a smaller audience than she deserves. Moreover, it perpetuates the assumption of her own day that a woman’s identity derives from her relationships with close male relatives. It would be a pity if late-twentieth-century interpretation would follow late seventeenth-and the early-eighteenth-century commonplace and represent her only as the daughter of a prominent Nonconformist minister, Samuel Annesley; as the wife of an Anglican priest who never quite became prominent, Samuel Wesley; and as the mother of Methodist founders John and CharlesWesley, whose undeniable prominence first brought her widespread recognition. Of course, in her day such relationships were underwritten and carefully constructed by contemporary piety, and how much more so for a woman attached to clergy in all demographic directions. Today piety continues to be part of the reason her identity is still dependent on the men in her life. But another factor in our less religious age is the practice of history, which has made useful beginnings but has still not succeeded in recovering the stories of all the notable women or in fully describing women’s experience in the past.