Mary Penry's Somerset-born mother was the granddaughter of army officers. Marriage without her guardians’ consent to a Welsh doctor from an impoverished Brecknockshire gentry family having cost her her inheritance, his death in 1740 left her and Mary (then five years old) destitute. They moved from Abergavenny to Bristol and in 1744 emigrated to Philadelphia, invited by a childless cousin married to a wealthy merchant. She having died in 1747, in 1751 Mary's mother had his child and was forced to marry him. Having made their lives a misery, his death in 1754 was a relief, but he left Mary and her mother only £1 each, which Mary was too proud to claim. However, Mary owed to him both schooling and training in book-keeping and business correspondence. In 1756 mother and daughter became Moravians. Mary, now twenty-one, moved to Bethlehem (America's principal Moravian settlement). In 1762 she became one of the first residents of the single sisters’ ‘choir’ house in the newer settlement of Lititz (Lancaster County), in which she lived until her death in 1804. Its residents (fifty-six in 1794, of whom Mary was the eldest) slept in the dormitory and prayed and dined in the hall, but spent their days in groups of eight who shared a room for work and relaxation. (When she was sixty-five Mary was given a small room of her own.) Mary kept the house's journal, membership list and accounts (all in German, Lititz being a German-speaking settlement), undertook the business correspondence, looked after visitors and did embroidery to earn her keep. A devout spinster who lived ‘a quiet and happy Life’ in her ‘sweet azylum [sic] of Peace and Love’, she was interested in theology and religious affairs, but also in local and international news – and politics, about which she had strong opinions. She corresponded with relatives and schoolfriends in Philadelphia, whom she occasionally visited. Though she had left Wales as a small child, she was proud of her identity as ‘the only Welch [sic] woman in the Single Sisters Choir’. Her greatest joy was to re-establish contact in 1793 (forty-nine years after emigrating) with her father's brother back in Brecon, his daughter and granddaughter, with whom she corresponded enthusiastically until her death. The Moravians valued marriage as well as singleness: of the ninety-three women (including Mary) in the Bethlehem Single Sisters’ House in 1758, 58 per cent eventually married. For her, unmarried life (in a religious community of women led by women) was a conscious choice: she thought ‘no state so happy as the Maiden state’. Mary Penry's adult life, though unusual except among Moravians, was uneventful, so her correspondence is not earth-shattering, but it offers interesting insights into Moravian and American life between 1759 and 1804. It is much more personal than the more formulaic Moravian memoirs and application letters that are all that many Moravians left behind. Scott Gordon's excellently annotated edition – one of only two dozen book-length publications of first-person writing by eighteenth-century American women – brings to life an engaging personality and the world that she inhabited.