Fry, Elizabeth Gurney, 1780-1845; Prison reformers -- Biography
Mrs. Fry dealt with women principally, and it was only in a very limited
degree that she could benefit the children of these fallen ones. Still
there can be no doubt that she did a large service to society in taking
possession of them and educating them while with their mothers. What
that work involved has been fully told in the preceding pages; its
results no pen can compute. Woman-like, she aimed at the improvement of
her own sex; but the reform which she inaugurated did not stop there.
Like a circle caused by the descent of a pebble into a lake, it widened
and extended and spread until she and her work became household words
among all classes of society, and in all civilized countries. Most women
would have shrunk back appalled at the terrible scene of degradation
which Newgate presented when she first entered its wards as a visitor;
others would have deemed it impossible to accomplish anything, save
under the auspices of Government, and by the aid of public funds. Not
thus did she regard the matter, but with earnest, oft-repeated
endeavors, she set herself to stem the tide of sin and suffering to be
found at that period in Government jails, and so successfully that a
radical change passed over the whole system before she died. Probably it
is not too much to say that no laborer in the cause of prison reform
ever won a larger share of success. Certainly none ever received a
larger meed of reverential love.
_Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications._
FAMOUS WOMEN SERIES.
EMILY BRONTE.
BY A. MARY F. ROBINSON.
+One vol. 16mo. Cloth. Price, $1.00.+
"Miss Robinson has written a fascinating biography.... Emily Bronte
is interesting, not because she wrote 'Wuthering Heights,' but
because of her brave, baffled, human life, so lonely, so full of
pain, but with a great hope shining beyond all the darkness, and a
passionate defiance in bearing more than the burdens that were laid
upon her. The story of the three sisters is infinitely sad, but it
is the ennobling sadness that belongs to large natures cramped and
striving for freedom to heroic, almost desperate, work, with little
or no result. The author of this intensely interesting,
sympathetic, and eloquent biography, is a young lady and a poet, to
whom a place is given in a recent anthology of living English
poets, which is supposed to contain only the best poems of the best
writers."--_Boston Daily Advertiser._
"Miss Robinson had many excellent qualifications for the task she
has performed in this little volume, among which may be named, an
enthusiastic interest in her subject and a real sympathy with Emily
Bronte's sad and heroic life. 'To represent her as she was,' says
Miss Robinson, 'would be her noblest and most fitting monument.'...
Emily Bronte here becomes well known to us and, in one sense, this
should be praise enough for any biography."--_New York Times._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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