While it is yet day : the story of Elizabeth Fry /
by Averil Douglas Opperman.
- Herefordshire : Orphans Publishing, 2015.
Family Trees -- Prologue -- Childhood -- Quaker Family -- Awakenings -- An American Friend -- Trip to London -- Subtle Changes -- Resolute Admirer -- Blushing Bride -- Visitors -- Motherhood -- Love and Death -- Plashet -- A Spell in Prison -- Domestic Change -- Anguish & Loneliness -- Return to Newgate -- Family Interlude -- Further Reform -- Convict Ships -- Capital Punishment -- Reluctant Celebrity -- Letter from Down Under -- Changing Times -- Inner Reflection -- Return to Domesticity -- Coastguards and Shepherds -- Gathering Clouds -- The Storm Approaches -- Adapting to Change -- Royalty and Reform -- Visiting the Continent -- Wilder Horizons -- Fry's Nursing Sisters -- The King of Prussia -- A Sad Farewell -- Inspiration For -- While it is Yet Day -- What is Quakerism? -- A Brief History of Quakerism -- Acknowledgements
"Elizabeth Fry was born in 1780 into a wealthy merchant family in Norwich. As a young Quaker girl she cared for the poor and as a teenager started a school for local children at her home.
Her greatest achievement was in prison reform but she also formalised nursing with her Fry's Nurses, some of whom later went with Florence Nightingale to the Crimea.
She encouraged a love of books and tried hard to eliminate illiteracy wherever she could. She felt her own education to be lacking and wrestled constantly with poor spelling, grammar and punctuation.
Although she loved her husband and her eleven children, she worried that she was not always the perfect wife or mother. She was torn between her duty to them, her faith and her need to work.
Tall with wavy blond hair, she had thoughtful eyes and a sweet rather than beautiful face. As a young girl, she loved pretty clothes, dancing and singing but later gave these up for a simple Quaker lifestyle and dress. She was dreadfully shy but very stubborn, determined and brave. Three things frightened her - the sea, darkness and death - and little else." -- Inner sleave