Spiritual Pilgrim: A Reassessment of the Life of the Countess of Huntingdon

Selina, Countess of Huntingdon (1707–91), was the only woman to play a prominent role in the Methodist Revival of the eighteenth century. Based on extensive original manuscript sources, including letters and papers, Edwin Welch’s Spiritual Pilgrim traces Selina’s story from a genteel but impoverished upbringing and the separation of her parents, to her marriage to Theophilus Hasting, the Ninth Earl of Huntingdon, to her clashes with the cleric John Wesley, to the final years of her life during which she founded a college for training evangelical ministers, supported an orphanage in Savannah, Georgia, encouraged the building of Calvinistic Methodist chapels in England and Wales, and established her own denomination.