Background
Shortly after the death of her father in December 1831, who she was very close to, Sharples came across "The Republican" magazine, which led to her losing her faith and starting a correspondence with its editor, Richard Carlile.
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Eliza Sharples
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Education
She was educated at a ladies college until the relatively late age of twenty.
Career
Eliza Sharples (1803—1852) was the first female freethought lecturer in England. Both her home and school life instilled a strong commitment to Christian principles. Sharples saw Frances Wright as a role model.
Sharples first met Richard Carlile and Robert Taylor in Bolton during the Lancashire leg of their 1829 Infidel Mission.
Her daughter’s memoirs provide some insight into how a respectable middle-class woman with a staunch Evangelical upbringing came to cross paths with the most notorious infidels of the day. Although Sharples claims not to have met Carlile on that occasion, it nevertheless sparked her interest, which was soon further heightened when she encountered a relative reading one of his early publications.
Carlile’s philosophies, Sharples later wrote, prompted a deep transformation. She described herself as a ‘brand snatched from the fire’.
She experienced a ‘new birth…unto righteousness’—an intense emotional conversion not unlike that felt by William Knight from his seat in the audience at the Blackfriars Rotunda.
Carlile died intestate in 1843, leaving his family destitute. Sharples did not succeed as a businesswoman, and died in 1852, after 20 years of living in poverty.
