Ann The Word: The Story of Ann Lee, Female Messiah, Mother of the Shakers, the Woman Clothed with the Sun - Tapa dura

’It is one of those books tht is utterly interesting for it’s own sake’
Jeanette Winterson

’A challenging reconstruction of a remote prophetic world’
Evening Standard

’Scrupulously researched and deftly constructed.’ City Life

'The first freestanding biography of the most powerful low-born religious woman since Joan of Arc. The Shakers were way different in Ann's day. They hung their chairs on the wall to create space for their dervish-like whirling, accompanied by raucous songs, shouting in tongues, calling out devils, falling down in ecstasy. Ann Lee was a holy terror.'
Sunday Times

'The first biography of Ann Lee, the remarkable woman who led a tiny band of followers to America and founded a religious movement. Ann Lee's commonplace exterior belied her charisma and intuition. Despite beatings, incarceration and accusations of witchcraft, heresy and spying, she formed around herself a coherent, devoted group of converts ... Richard Francis has created a compelling image of this shadowy, shining woman and the God-fearing, God-obsessed world in which she lived.'
Observer

'Ann Lee's transformation from illiterate Mancunian blacksmith's daughter to sovereign pontiff of a thriving New England sect is one of the more bizarre and fascinating byways of Anglo-American history. These heady days of Shakerism are unlikely to be better depicted than in this book, with its meticulously researched account of this heroic, indomitable, mesmerising, chastity-obsessed, and ultimately rather ghastly woman.'
Sunday Telegraph

'Entertaining and absorbing. If you put it in the guest bathroom I guarantee long absences at dinner.' Jeanette Winterson, The Times

The first biography of Ann Lee, founder of the American Shaker movement and female Messiah. From humble origins in 18th century Manchester, Ann Lee (or Mother as she liked to be known) became the visionary religious leader of a community of the faithful in America.

In 1773 Ann Lee left the Manchester House of Correction where she had starved and been deprived of sleep for 14 days. In that time she claimed that, in a vision, God told her that she was the Messiah. She set forth to proclaim ‘Ann the Word’, the woman ‘clothed with the sun’ and took the title of Mother. Ironically her own four children all died at birth.

To escape persecution in 18th century Manchester, she took the faithful, including her husband and father, on a pilgrimage to America arriving in New York and later settling in Niskeyuna.

The Shaker phenomenon grew, fuelled by visions of Mother Ann after her death in 1784. Famed particularly for their later characteristic furniture design the shakers were only disbanded in the 1960s. This is the first account of the extraordinary life of a visionary who founded a community in her own image in Pioneering America.

Only in the 19th century did the Shakers create their characteristic furniture designs. The Shakers disbanded in the 1960s.