Educator, revivalist, spiritual leader, autobiographer, and decidedly "public" figure, Sarah Osborn gained eminence in Newport, Rhode Island, during the series of mid-eighteenth-century religious revivals known as the Great Awakening. Her life and writings demonstrate not only the importance of women to this movement but also the unconventional roles that women might fashion for themselves when they acted in the name of the Lord.

Born in London on 22 February 1714 to Benjamin and Susanna Guyse Haggar, Osborn briefly attended a boarding school near London, where she received largely religious instruction. At the age of eight she emigrated with her mother to join her father in Boston. After moving around southeastern New England for several years, the family settled permanently in Newport, Rhode Island, when Sarah was a teenager. The piety that Osborn emphasizes in her spiritual autobiography, Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Sarah Osborn (1799), was apparently accompanied by a...