Female Messiah, Mother of the Shakers, the Woman Clothed with the Sun.
Ann Lee was one of the most extraordinary and mysterious women in the history of western culture - possibly the most influential artisan woman since Joan of Arc. Born in Manchester in 1736, she was the illiterate daughter of one blacksmith and later wife of another. When she died in America, aged forty-eight, she left behind her a religion which was to have thousands of followers and which became America's most important and successful utopian community.
This is the first serious biography of a woman who, in feminising Christianity, made an enormous and undervalued contribution to the status of women, who in a life packed with drama and adventure established Shakerism almost by accident and who, having lost her own children, became Mother to thousands of Shakers during her lifetime and in the two centuries since her death.
