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TEXTUAL NOTE The texts used in this edition are the 1836 edition of The Life and Religious Experience of ]arena Lee, the 1846 edition of Zilpha Elaw's Memoirs, and the 1879 edition of Julia Foote's A BTand Plucked from the Fire. Lee published a second, expanded edition of her autobiography in 1849 under the title Religious Experience and]ournal of Mrs. ]arena Lee. After reprinting the 1836 narrative in its entirety, Lee added materials from a journal of her ministerial activities, which extended her life story some two decades beyond the conclusion of her 1836 narrative. This journal, however, reads very much like a log of distances traveled, scriptural texts expounded, places visited, and numbers of people converted. Contemporary readers unused to the forInulaic character of nineteenth-century ministerial journals and autobiographies are likely to find the added pages of the 1849 edition often tedious reading and rarely if ever revelatory of the inner character of the woman who wrote them. Because the added length of the 1849 edition does not offer us an appreciably expanded selfportrait of Jarena Lee, this volume reprints the first edition of Lee's autobiography. Further comments on her Religious Experience and]ournal can be found in the introduction to this book. The Memoirs of the Life, Religious Experience, M"inisterial Travels and Labours of Mrs. Zilpha Elaw was published at its author's expense in London in 1846, at the conclusion of Elaw's five-year preaching mission in Great Britain. This autobiography has never been reprinted until now. Julia A. J. Foote financed the publication of two editions of A Brand Plucked from the Fire, the first in 1879 and a reprint in 1886, both printed in Cleveland. The edition used in this book is that of 1879, reprinted here for the first time. In each of these three texts the original spelling, punctuation, paragraphing, and chapter and section divisions have been preserved, except in cases in which there is an inconsistency of spelling within a text, the evident result of a printer's error. Idiosyncrasies of spelling or punctuation regularly employed by each author in her text have been maintained. All footnotes in the texts are provided by the editor. Other bracketed interpolations, e.g., those identifying passages in the 24 Textual Note Bible, are also the editor's. The purpose of these interpolations is to locate for the reader quoted passages in each text whose sources are not identified by the author of the text. In other instances of appropriation of biblical words and phrases without quotation, the interpolated references are designed to indicate something of the stylistic debt that th.ese autobiographies owe to the King James version of the Bible. ...

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