A prolific author, Jane Ward Lead (Leade) was an important religious personage and founder of the Philadelphian Society, whose prose is frequently punctuated with verse. It has been only recently, with the growth of interest in women authors and thinkers, that she has become known to a current audience. A few excerpts of her prose writings will be found in recent anthologies. Her married name appears in both spellings.

She was the daughter of Schildknap Ward of Norfolk, receiving at home only the inadequate customary education given to middle-class women. The mysticism which was to dominate her later life and writing first emerged when she was fifteen, at which time during Christmas celebrations, she records, she heard a whispering voice. Her subsequent melancholy ended at eighteen when another vision pardoned a lie told earlier in her life. In 1644, at twenty-one, she married William Lead (Leade), six years her...