The Autobiography of Madame Guyon

Guyon set down her life at her spiritual director’s command, and the result is one of the odder documents in French religious writing: part confession, part self-defense, part record of a woman arguing with God and with bishops. She recounts a childhood in Montargis, a forced marriage at fifteen to a man of thirty-eight, early widowhood, and the restless years through Savoy and Grenoble when she began teaching a wordless, inward prayer. The last chapters turn grim. She hands the manuscript to the Bishop of Meaux, quarrels with him over a certificate of orthodoxy, and is arrested in December 1695 and taken to Vincennes, where the narrative breaks off. She declines to detail the persecution that followed. Guyon lost the Quietist quarrel in France; Wesley and the Pietists kept her book alive everywhere else.