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Hetty Wesley
Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch was a Cornish writer, who published under the pen name of Q. He published his Dead Man's Rock (a romance in the vein of Stevenson's Treasure Island) in 1887, and he followed this up with Troy Town (1888) and The Splendid Spur (1889). After some journalistic experience in London, mainly as a contributor to the Speaker, in 1891 he settled at Fowey in Cornwall. He published in 1896 a series of critical articles, Adventures in Criticism, and in 1898 he completed Robert Louis Stevenson's unfinished novel, St Ives. With the exception of the parodies entitled Green Bays: Verses and Parodies (1893), his poetical work is contained in Poems and Ballads (1896). In 1895 he published an anthology from the sixteenth and seventeenth-century English lyrists, The Golden Pomp, followed in 1900 by an equally successful Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900 (1900). He was made a Bard of Gorseth Kernow in 1928, taking the Bardic name Marghak Cough ('Red Knight').
244 pages, Paperback
Published June 29, 2007
About the author
Arthur Quiller-Couch
781 books72 followersSir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch was a Cornish writer, who published under the pen name of Q. He is primarily remembered for the monumental "Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1900" (later extended to 1918), and for his literary criticism. He guided the taste of many who never met him, including American writer Helene Hanff, author of 84 Charing Cross Road, its sequel, Q's Legacy, and the putatively fictional Horace Rumpole via John Mortimer, his literary amanuensis.
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May 5, 2026
My interest in this book is primarily because I am researching the Wesley sisters with a view to writing a book about them. The sisters of John and Charles Wesley have not so far been critically studied in the light of gender theory or gender history. Only a few of them could be classified as ‘Methodist’, most standing aloof from the religious passion of their better-known brothers, though all of them are at least Methodist adjacent. Most of the existing work on the sisters is uncritical, dated, or both. The best are probably the relevant chapters in Maldwyn Edwards’s 'Family Circle' (1949), and Frederick Maser’s 1988 book, 'The Story of the Wesley Sisters,' perhaps better known by its rather romantic subtitle, 'Seven Sisters in Search of Love'. Nineteenth-century biographical collections, such as those of Adam Clarke and George Stevenson, are detailed but not always reliable. All these sources contain valuable information but, of course, they were not based on the newer critical editions of the Works of John Wesley, where there can be found a large amount of extant correspondence with the sisters. Edwards, Maser and Quiller-Couch did not (and could not) have drawn on today’s burgeoning field of women in early Methodism or on recent studies on women, sex, and gender in the eighteenth century.
Maldwyn Edwards considered Hetty Wesley to be ‘the supreme vindication of the early training given to the [Wesley] daughters. The natural gifts were developed and her conversation, her letters, the poetry, and the testimony of others, are several tributes to her independent mind and ready scholarship. Her reading was wide and balanced. She knew Latin and some Greek, but English she could write like a master.’ She is said to have been able to read the New Testament in Greek at eight or nine years of age. Frederick Maser considered Hetty, ‘the most brilliant’ of Samuel Wesley’s daughters, a poignant observation given her father’s alienating attitude toward her.
While not outstanding among poets, several of her works were published in The Gentleman’s Magazine and elsewhere. The poem, 'Eupolis: His Hymn to the Creator,' usually ascribed to her father, Samuel, may have actually been composed by Hetty or at least bears the imprint of her genius. The rather poor quality of Samuel’s poetic output further supports this suggestion. She is mentioned by John Duncombe (1729-1786) in his 1754 celebration of British women writers, 'The Feminead' and lauded by ‘Silvius’ in The Gentleman’s Magazine who, after taking note of her physical beauty, asks, ‘Oh! What words, what numbers shall I find / T’express the boundless treasures of her mind.’ Her poems were also reprinted in The Christian Magazine, The Arminian Magazine, and in Adam Clarke’s Memoirs of the Wesley Family.
The curate and schoolmaster at Wroote, John Romley loved Hetty but also courted her sister Martha (Patty) for some time until the dalliance was broken off by Samuel Wesley Snr. Hetty fell pregnant out of wedlock in 1726 which led to her father Samuel totally disowning her, treating her with heartless contempt and forcing her into a loveless marriage with a virtual stranger. She had been courted by a lawyer, Will Atkins, who promised insincerely to marry her, while she was a governess at the Grantham household at Kelstein. The couple planned to elope, but it was a short-lived romance. Arriving in London, they spent the night together on the understanding that they would be married the following day. However, Atkins ended the relationship, and Hetty was left pregnant and without a husband, an unenviable situation for any young woman in the eighteenth century. Returning to Epworth in shame, she offered to marry any suitor her father could find for her, a rash promise that resulted in great unhappiness.
When John Wesley urged tenderness toward his sister in a sermon at Wroote on 28 August entitled, ‘Universal Charity or The Charity Due to Wicked Persons,’ his father was outraged, and his mother Susanna knew with characteristic insight, ‘You writ this sermon for Hetty.’ Wesley openly admitted this, writing to his brother Samuel, ‘One great reason for me writing the above mentioned sermon was to endeavour, as far as in me lay, to convince them that even on supposition that she was impenitent some tenderness was due to her still.’ Her disabled sister, Molly, was the only sister to stand by Hetty who was never fully forgiven by her father, even though she yearned to be taken back into the family. Quiller-Coach depicts Samuel Wesley as a tyrannical parent, but Maldwyn Edwards saw this as a mischaracterization, seeking to rehabilitate Samuel’s reputation as instead ‘a failure of sympathy and understanding’ and ‘an incompatibility of temperament.’
Frederick Maser is less forgiving, describing both Susanna and Samuel’s inability to express love and affection for their children as ‘a form of Methodist heresy’. Susanna, ‘in all her wise advice on the rearing of children…never once spoke of the necessity of demonstrating love and affection for them. Samuel, of course, never came near to this goal. He was proud of his sons, and, in his way, appreciated his daughters, but love in its warmest, deepest sense was foreign to his character…although we may understand the conduct of the Wesleys in their relationship with Hetty, we can never condone or excuse it, lest we give away the whole case for Christianity.’
Hetty was forced by her father into an unwanted marriage with the plumber and glazier, William Wright on 13 October 1725. It was a union, according to Green, ‘marked from the start with unhappiness.’ She gave birth to a girl, baptised on 18 February 1726, the fruit of her ill-fated union with Atkins, but the baby died on 27 December. None of the Wesleys, with the possible exception of Molly, attended the child’s funeral. Wright could not make much of a living until twelve years into their marriage, when, in 1737 Hetty benefited from an inheritance of 200 pounds from her Uncle Matthew, who had earlier given her 500 pounds as a wedding gift. ‘Hetty grew closer and closer to her Uncle Matthew. She appreciated his tolerant, Christian spirit, and he enjoyed her company, her brilliant mind, and her compassionate, understanding attitude toward life.’ Hetty nursed him through several bouts of illness and when he died it was in her compassionate arms. Wright drank to excess and beat Hetty, often leaving her at home while he caroused in the tavern, and for a time refusing to allow her to attend any Methodist meetings. In one of her poems, Hetty protested:
…Why dost thou shun
These faithful arms, and eager run
To some obscure, unclean retreat,
With fiends incarnate glad to meet,
The vile companions of thy mirth,
The scum and refuse of the earth;
Who, when inspired by beer, can grin
At witless oaths and jests obscene,
Till the most learned of the throng
Begins a take of ten hours long;
While thou, in raptures, with stretched jaws,
Crownest each joke with loud applause?
Deprived of freedom, health, and ease,
And rivalled by such things as these,
This latest effort will I try,
Or to regain thy heart, or die.
Soft as I am, I’ll make thee see
I will not brook contempt from thee.
After experiencing the loss of several children in multiple cases of infant mortality, she began to wonder if she were cursed by God in the absence of her father’s forgiveness. She begged to be forgiven, but he remained hard hearted. 'Should God give and take away another (child),' she wrote, 'I can never escape the thought that my father’s intercession might have prevailed against His wrath, which I shall then take to be also manifest. Forgive me, sir … But as you planted my matrimonial bliss so you cannot run away from my prayer when I beseech you to water it with a little kindness. My brothers will report to you what they have seen of my way of life and my daily struggle to redeem the past. But I have come to the point where I feel your forgiveness to be necessary to me. I beseech you then not to withhold it.'
Hetty was convinced that her children were dying from lead poisoning from her husband’s paint factory. Another of her poems, 'A Mother’s Address to Her Dying Infant' laments such loss.
Tender softness! infant mild!
Perfect, purest, brightest child!
Transient lustre! Beauteous clay!
Smiling wonder of a day!
The unhappiness of her marriage is quite understated in a letter to her father written on 3 July 1729.
'I think exactly of my marriage as I did before it happened; but though I would have given at least one of my eyes for the liberty of throwing myself at your feet before I was married at all, yet since it is past, and matrimonial grievances are usually irreparable, I hope you will condescend to be so far of my opinion as to own that, since upon some accounts I am happier than I deserve, it is best to say little of things quite past remedy, and endeavour, as I really do, to make myself more and more contented, though things may not be to my wish.'
Hetty was present at the death of her mother, Susanna, at the Foundry in July 1742, along with her surviving siblings and it may have been that the shared grief brought about some reconciliation among them. It was around this time that she became a Methodist. During her final years, spent mostly in ill health, her faith seemed to grow stronger as her body weakened. Visits to a health spa in Bristol did little to restore her. In 1743, she wrote to John that when she first heard his and his brother’s teachings, she could not accept them. When she later experienced repentance, she hesitated to testify to the change she had undergone for fear of hypocrisy. Now, with her health declining she was ready to declare, ‘I have long desired to know one thing, Jesus Christ and Him crucified, and this desire prevails above all others … I am enabled to seek Him still, and to be satisfied with nothing else than God …’ Shortly before her death, she told a friend, ‘I have ardently wished for death, because you know, we Methodists always die in a transport of joy.’ She died on 21 March 1750, during a series of earthquakes in London, a period of public concern that strangely mirrored the tumultuousness of her private life. The location of her final resting place remains unknown.
After Hetty's death on 21 March 1750, Charles Wesley wrote to his wife, Sarah, ‘Last Monday I followed our happy sister to her grave. Her husband is inconsolable, not knowing Jesus Christ. I was much affected by his saying with tears, he hoped I should not forsake him now my sister was dead. He makes bold to send his love to you.’ A little over a year later, Charles found Wright ‘struck down by the dead-palsy. Longed above all things for my coming; rejoiced and wept to see me. His stubborn heart was much softened by the approach of death. Now he is a poor sinner indeed, full of horror and self-condemnation, yet not without hope of mercy.’ Maldwyn Edwards poignantly summarises Hetty Wesley's tragic life: ‘Hetty is remembered as a high-spirited lovely girl who suffered at the hands of her lover, her father, and then her husband, and whose gallant courage could not withstand the deadening effects of an ignorant man’s weakness and petty vice.’
These are the broad facts against which Quiller-Couch writes his rather romantic novel. Punctuating the narrative with items of correspondence from the Wesley family members works ok but leads to tone shifts that are a bit clunky. For the most part he keeps John Wesley in the background, which is a sensible choice. The novel is bookended by a nineteenth-century colonial narrative set in 'British India' designed to highlight the survival and flourishing of Wesleyan Methodism in that later period. This is only partially successful. Quiller-Couch draws the characters in a lively and engaging way but, having just read George Eliot's 'The Mill on the Floss' which deals with similar subject matter, 'Hetty Wesley' is clearly not of the same literary excellence. It could however be the basis of a good TV series in the mode of 'Poldark' or 'Outlander.'
All of the interesting Wesley sisters deserve to be better remembered than they are. They were for the most part victims of the cruelty of men to whose abuse they were made vulnerable by a patriarchal system of social control. Only through marriage could they find the financial security they needed, which led to entrapments that led to tragedy and deep sorrow. Wesley’s sermon on ‘Universal Charity’ was written in part ‘for Hetty,’ to convince his family that ‘even on supposition that she was impenitent some tenderness was due to her still.’ A fresh, critical study of the Wesley sisters in their context is needed and could also be written ‘for them,’ to provoke our own tenderness toward them and the women for whom patriarchal systems of control still cruelly operate today.
Maldwyn Edwards considered Hetty Wesley to be ‘the supreme vindication of the early training given to the [Wesley] daughters. The natural gifts were developed and her conversation, her letters, the poetry, and the testimony of others, are several tributes to her independent mind and ready scholarship. Her reading was wide and balanced. She knew Latin and some Greek, but English she could write like a master.’ She is said to have been able to read the New Testament in Greek at eight or nine years of age. Frederick Maser considered Hetty, ‘the most brilliant’ of Samuel Wesley’s daughters, a poignant observation given her father’s alienating attitude toward her.
While not outstanding among poets, several of her works were published in The Gentleman’s Magazine and elsewhere. The poem, 'Eupolis: His Hymn to the Creator,' usually ascribed to her father, Samuel, may have actually been composed by Hetty or at least bears the imprint of her genius. The rather poor quality of Samuel’s poetic output further supports this suggestion. She is mentioned by John Duncombe (1729-1786) in his 1754 celebration of British women writers, 'The Feminead' and lauded by ‘Silvius’ in The Gentleman’s Magazine who, after taking note of her physical beauty, asks, ‘Oh! What words, what numbers shall I find / T’express the boundless treasures of her mind.’ Her poems were also reprinted in The Christian Magazine, The Arminian Magazine, and in Adam Clarke’s Memoirs of the Wesley Family.
The curate and schoolmaster at Wroote, John Romley loved Hetty but also courted her sister Martha (Patty) for some time until the dalliance was broken off by Samuel Wesley Snr. Hetty fell pregnant out of wedlock in 1726 which led to her father Samuel totally disowning her, treating her with heartless contempt and forcing her into a loveless marriage with a virtual stranger. She had been courted by a lawyer, Will Atkins, who promised insincerely to marry her, while she was a governess at the Grantham household at Kelstein. The couple planned to elope, but it was a short-lived romance. Arriving in London, they spent the night together on the understanding that they would be married the following day. However, Atkins ended the relationship, and Hetty was left pregnant and without a husband, an unenviable situation for any young woman in the eighteenth century. Returning to Epworth in shame, she offered to marry any suitor her father could find for her, a rash promise that resulted in great unhappiness.
When John Wesley urged tenderness toward his sister in a sermon at Wroote on 28 August entitled, ‘Universal Charity or The Charity Due to Wicked Persons,’ his father was outraged, and his mother Susanna knew with characteristic insight, ‘You writ this sermon for Hetty.’ Wesley openly admitted this, writing to his brother Samuel, ‘One great reason for me writing the above mentioned sermon was to endeavour, as far as in me lay, to convince them that even on supposition that she was impenitent some tenderness was due to her still.’ Her disabled sister, Molly, was the only sister to stand by Hetty who was never fully forgiven by her father, even though she yearned to be taken back into the family. Quiller-Coach depicts Samuel Wesley as a tyrannical parent, but Maldwyn Edwards saw this as a mischaracterization, seeking to rehabilitate Samuel’s reputation as instead ‘a failure of sympathy and understanding’ and ‘an incompatibility of temperament.’
Frederick Maser is less forgiving, describing both Susanna and Samuel’s inability to express love and affection for their children as ‘a form of Methodist heresy’. Susanna, ‘in all her wise advice on the rearing of children…never once spoke of the necessity of demonstrating love and affection for them. Samuel, of course, never came near to this goal. He was proud of his sons, and, in his way, appreciated his daughters, but love in its warmest, deepest sense was foreign to his character…although we may understand the conduct of the Wesleys in their relationship with Hetty, we can never condone or excuse it, lest we give away the whole case for Christianity.’
Hetty was forced by her father into an unwanted marriage with the plumber and glazier, William Wright on 13 October 1725. It was a union, according to Green, ‘marked from the start with unhappiness.’ She gave birth to a girl, baptised on 18 February 1726, the fruit of her ill-fated union with Atkins, but the baby died on 27 December. None of the Wesleys, with the possible exception of Molly, attended the child’s funeral. Wright could not make much of a living until twelve years into their marriage, when, in 1737 Hetty benefited from an inheritance of 200 pounds from her Uncle Matthew, who had earlier given her 500 pounds as a wedding gift. ‘Hetty grew closer and closer to her Uncle Matthew. She appreciated his tolerant, Christian spirit, and he enjoyed her company, her brilliant mind, and her compassionate, understanding attitude toward life.’ Hetty nursed him through several bouts of illness and when he died it was in her compassionate arms. Wright drank to excess and beat Hetty, often leaving her at home while he caroused in the tavern, and for a time refusing to allow her to attend any Methodist meetings. In one of her poems, Hetty protested:
…Why dost thou shun
These faithful arms, and eager run
To some obscure, unclean retreat,
With fiends incarnate glad to meet,
The vile companions of thy mirth,
The scum and refuse of the earth;
Who, when inspired by beer, can grin
At witless oaths and jests obscene,
Till the most learned of the throng
Begins a take of ten hours long;
While thou, in raptures, with stretched jaws,
Crownest each joke with loud applause?
Deprived of freedom, health, and ease,
And rivalled by such things as these,
This latest effort will I try,
Or to regain thy heart, or die.
Soft as I am, I’ll make thee see
I will not brook contempt from thee.
After experiencing the loss of several children in multiple cases of infant mortality, she began to wonder if she were cursed by God in the absence of her father’s forgiveness. She begged to be forgiven, but he remained hard hearted. 'Should God give and take away another (child),' she wrote, 'I can never escape the thought that my father’s intercession might have prevailed against His wrath, which I shall then take to be also manifest. Forgive me, sir … But as you planted my matrimonial bliss so you cannot run away from my prayer when I beseech you to water it with a little kindness. My brothers will report to you what they have seen of my way of life and my daily struggle to redeem the past. But I have come to the point where I feel your forgiveness to be necessary to me. I beseech you then not to withhold it.'
Hetty was convinced that her children were dying from lead poisoning from her husband’s paint factory. Another of her poems, 'A Mother’s Address to Her Dying Infant' laments such loss.
Tender softness! infant mild!
Perfect, purest, brightest child!
Transient lustre! Beauteous clay!
Smiling wonder of a day!
The unhappiness of her marriage is quite understated in a letter to her father written on 3 July 1729.
'I think exactly of my marriage as I did before it happened; but though I would have given at least one of my eyes for the liberty of throwing myself at your feet before I was married at all, yet since it is past, and matrimonial grievances are usually irreparable, I hope you will condescend to be so far of my opinion as to own that, since upon some accounts I am happier than I deserve, it is best to say little of things quite past remedy, and endeavour, as I really do, to make myself more and more contented, though things may not be to my wish.'
Hetty was present at the death of her mother, Susanna, at the Foundry in July 1742, along with her surviving siblings and it may have been that the shared grief brought about some reconciliation among them. It was around this time that she became a Methodist. During her final years, spent mostly in ill health, her faith seemed to grow stronger as her body weakened. Visits to a health spa in Bristol did little to restore her. In 1743, she wrote to John that when she first heard his and his brother’s teachings, she could not accept them. When she later experienced repentance, she hesitated to testify to the change she had undergone for fear of hypocrisy. Now, with her health declining she was ready to declare, ‘I have long desired to know one thing, Jesus Christ and Him crucified, and this desire prevails above all others … I am enabled to seek Him still, and to be satisfied with nothing else than God …’ Shortly before her death, she told a friend, ‘I have ardently wished for death, because you know, we Methodists always die in a transport of joy.’ She died on 21 March 1750, during a series of earthquakes in London, a period of public concern that strangely mirrored the tumultuousness of her private life. The location of her final resting place remains unknown.
After Hetty's death on 21 March 1750, Charles Wesley wrote to his wife, Sarah, ‘Last Monday I followed our happy sister to her grave. Her husband is inconsolable, not knowing Jesus Christ. I was much affected by his saying with tears, he hoped I should not forsake him now my sister was dead. He makes bold to send his love to you.’ A little over a year later, Charles found Wright ‘struck down by the dead-palsy. Longed above all things for my coming; rejoiced and wept to see me. His stubborn heart was much softened by the approach of death. Now he is a poor sinner indeed, full of horror and self-condemnation, yet not without hope of mercy.’ Maldwyn Edwards poignantly summarises Hetty Wesley's tragic life: ‘Hetty is remembered as a high-spirited lovely girl who suffered at the hands of her lover, her father, and then her husband, and whose gallant courage could not withstand the deadening effects of an ignorant man’s weakness and petty vice.’
These are the broad facts against which Quiller-Couch writes his rather romantic novel. Punctuating the narrative with items of correspondence from the Wesley family members works ok but leads to tone shifts that are a bit clunky. For the most part he keeps John Wesley in the background, which is a sensible choice. The novel is bookended by a nineteenth-century colonial narrative set in 'British India' designed to highlight the survival and flourishing of Wesleyan Methodism in that later period. This is only partially successful. Quiller-Couch draws the characters in a lively and engaging way but, having just read George Eliot's 'The Mill on the Floss' which deals with similar subject matter, 'Hetty Wesley' is clearly not of the same literary excellence. It could however be the basis of a good TV series in the mode of 'Poldark' or 'Outlander.'
All of the interesting Wesley sisters deserve to be better remembered than they are. They were for the most part victims of the cruelty of men to whose abuse they were made vulnerable by a patriarchal system of social control. Only through marriage could they find the financial security they needed, which led to entrapments that led to tragedy and deep sorrow. Wesley’s sermon on ‘Universal Charity’ was written in part ‘for Hetty,’ to convince his family that ‘even on supposition that she was impenitent some tenderness was due to her still.’ A fresh, critical study of the Wesley sisters in their context is needed and could also be written ‘for them,’ to provoke our own tenderness toward them and the women for whom patriarchal systems of control still cruelly operate today.
November 5, 2020
This is another book I doubt I would have picked up of my own accord, but which has ended up on my shelves via my grandmother. It's well written, making it surprisingly easy to follow given that I knew next to nothing about the subject matter when I picked it up (I didn't know there was such a thing as a Wesleyan Methodist). As someone less invested in the religious history, what stood out to me was the lives of the women involved, which seem pretty tragic all round.
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