However, she was soon married, and a happy life resulted.  For most women this marriage, which made her the mother of eleven children, would have made all public work impossible; but to a woman of Elizabeth Fry’s strong character nothing seemed impossible.  Whether she would have accomplished more for the world had she remained unmarried, no one can tell.

Her husband’s parents were “plain, consistent friends,” and his sister became especially congenial to the young bride.  A large and airy house was taken in London, St. Mildred’s Court, which became a centre for “Friends” in both Great Britain and America.

With all her wealth and her fondness for her family, she wrote in her journal, “I have been married eight years yesterday; various trials of faith and patience have been permitted me; my course has been very different to what I had expected; instead of being, as I had hoped, a useful instrument in the Church Militant, here I am a careworn wife and mother outwardly, nearly devoted to the things of this life; though at times this difference in my destination has been trying to me, yet I believe those trials (which have certainly been very pinching) that I have had to go through have been very useful, and have brought me to a feeling sense of what I am; and at the same time have taught me where power is, and in what we are to glory; not in ourselves nor in anything we can be or do, but we are alone to desire that He may be glorified, either through us or others, in our being something or nothing, as He may see best for us.”

After eleven years the Fry family moved to a beautiful home in the country at Plashet.  Changes had come in those eleven years.  The father had died; one sister had married Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, and she herself had been made a “minister” by the Society of Friends.  While her hands were very full with the care of her seven children, she had yet found time to do much outside Christian work.

Naturally shrinking, she says, “I find it an awful thing to rise amongst a large assembly, and, unless much covered with love and power, hardly know how to venture.”  But she seemed always to be “covered with love and power,” for she prayed much and studied her Bible closely, and her preaching seemed to melt alike crowned heads and criminals in chains.

Opposite the Plashet House, with its great trees and flowers, was a dilapidated building occupied by an aged man and his sister.  They had once been well-to-do, but were now very poor, earning a pittance by selling rabbits.  The sister, shy and sorrowful from their reduced circumstances, was nearly inaccessible, but Mrs. Fry won her way to her heart.  Then she asked how they would like to have a girls’ school in a big room attached to the building.  They consented, and soon seventy poor girls were in attendance.

“She had,” says a friend, “the gentlest touch with children.  She would win their hearts, if they had never seen her before, almost at the first glance, and by the first sound of her musical voice.”