The fourteen essays in Women, Preachers, Methodists were first presented at two conferences in the UK in 2019 that marked the 350th anniversary of Susanna Wesley's birth in 1669. The first conference, organized by the British Methodist Heritage Committee, focused on the mother of the Wesleys, while the second, held at the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History, explored Methodist women preachers in Britain. Part I of the collection contains four essays on Susanna Wesley; the seven essays in Part II consider Methodist women preachers from the 1740s to the beginning of the twentieth century; in Part III, the volume concludes with personal reflections of three ordained Methodist women preachers active from the 1970s to the present. As this indicates, the book is a commemorative volume, an academic research text, and a compilation of personal reflections. Nonetheless, as the title indicates, Women, Preachers, Methodists gives the book a unified focus. This is aided by some helpful footnotes that cross-reference common subjects and themes in the chapters.

The first section opens with a commemorative chapter by Charles Wallace, editor of Susanna Wesley: The Complete Writings. He highlights some developments in our knowledge of Susanna since this 1997 publication and exhorts the inheritors of Susanna's heritage to receive it, practice it, and hand it on. William Gibson's engaging analysis of “Susanna Wesley's Political Marriage” alongside his subsequent monograph Samuel Wesley and the Crisis of Tory Piety, 1685–1720, sheds fascinating new light on her relationship with her husband, Samuel. They can be described as “well-matched” (32) because they decisively moved to the Church of England from Dissenting families, shared Tory and High Church convictions, and held firm Christian beliefs. Yet somewhat paradoxically, they can be seen as incompatible in a marriage “marked by repeated breakdowns and disagreements” (47). Gibson examines five important episodes in their lives to illustrate how this was so, in some instances, drawing on research that has only recently become available. Each episode demonstrates the intertwined nature of religion and politics in their context and relationship. Susanna Wesley's thinking on and practice of female education and its legacy in early Methodism is the subject of a chapter by Linda Ryan. Susanna's educational methods are placed in the context of conceptions of gender and childhood in the long eighteenth century. Her prioritization of education for her daughters was striking, while, nonetheless, their education was limited by the constraints of the time. This probably contributed to John Wesley's ambivalence toward female education, where the goal was piety, not education for its own sake. John Lenton concludes part I with a study on the connection between Susanna Wesley and her son John around the concept of ‘the extraordinary call.’ It was Susanna who convinced John of the extraordinary call of Thomas Maxfield, possibly the first lay preacher in Methodism. Lenton makes a significant contribution to scholarship on the preaching of early Methodist women by showing how John Wesley eventually came to see that the argument he used for male lay preachers having an extraordinary call could also apply in the case of successful female preachers.

The essays in Part II concentrate on Methodist women preachers in the eighteenth and, especially, nineteenth centuries, often providing insight into little known aspects of the subject. Eryn White details the ways in which Calvinist Methodist women contributed to the Evangelical Revival in Wales in the eighteenth century. She brings to light the two known women preachers—Elizabeth Thomas and Jane Owens—and other ways in which women shaped the movement as hymn and letter writers, as well as participants in Methodist societies and providers of hospitality. John Lenton's essay on the calling of early Wesleyan Methodist women preachers from 1760 to 1820 offers careful analysis of the rich data he has uncovered on the subject. Drawing on the records of sixty-seven women preachers he has identified, he examines both the processes by which they became preachers and the results of their preaching. Lenton addresses pertinent questions, such as how they began preaching, where they preached, and how they financed their ministry. David Bundy's chapter, uniquely in the volume, provides a study of a female preacher who engaged in the networks of the Radical Holiness Movement while remaining the Victorian conception of a model spouse of a Wesleyan Methodist superintendent minister. Catherine Stephens Smith's fascinating journey is reconstructed by Bundy via her husband, Thornley Smith's, published memoir of her, as well as sources relating to the developing Radical Holiness Movement in Britain. Bundy shows how she found her voice and ministry, in part, through public speaking (largely to other women) in Holiness Movement events.

A theme that runs through Part II is the decline of women preachers in all branches of nineteenth-century British Methodism. It receives attention in Tim Macquiban's chapter on early Primitive Methodist women preachers, and Colin Short's essay on female preachers among the Bible Christians. This topic is the focus on Jill Baber's chapter in relation to Primitive Methodism. While there were over one hundred women appointed as itinerant preachers from 1813 to 1844, comprising nearly twenty percent of all preachers, none appear in the official records of Primitive Methodism after 1862. Nonetheless, female preaching in Primitive Methodism never became extinct, as there continued to be women local preachers. Barber insightfully enumerates eight reasons for the decline of women preachers in Primitive Methodism, many of which apply to Methodism as a whole in nineteenth-century Britain.

Part III, “Women Methodist Ministers Reflect,” contains the reflections of Christiana Le Moignan, Judith Maizel-Long, and Michaela Youngson. Le Moignan was one of the first women accepted to the ministry when it was opened to women in the early 1970s, going on to become the second woman to be President of the Conference. She considers the place of her story in the history of Methodist women preachers. Maizel-Long was a superintendent and theological tutor. She recounts the interesting journey of her calling as a Methodist minister and her commitment to feminism. Youngson was President of the Conference in 2018–19 and is currently Assistant Secretary of the Conference. Her reflections focus on women and leadership in the Methodist Church today. Collectively, these personal testimonies provide examples of how recent Methodist women ministers have experienced their calling and exercised their ministry.