Refashioning Religious Community in Early 20th-century Britain: Adela Curtis and the 'White Ladies'

In her attempt to create newly fashioned and newly appealing religious communities, Adela Curtis (1864 – 1960) combined many of the quirkier interests of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. New Thought, mysticism, celibacy, vegetarianism, Anglican biblical scholarship and a suspicion of institutional religion all joined in the creation of Miss Curtis's monastic communities. Free from any church ties, Miss Curtis attracted enough adherents to make the local clergy jealous, and drew many disciples from Britain and America to her lectures and retreats on topics ranging from the New Testament to meditation to the spirituality of composting.

At the Order of Silence near Reading, the silent meditative life – which each member or visitor practiced in one of the hundred individual cells and in communal gatherings in the Sanctuary – was combined with a Benedictine-style farming life. At the Community of Christian Contemplatives in Dorset, this combination of the contemplative and the active was developed further. Each member was to be self-sufficient, living in a small hut on a quarter-acre plot of land, growing all their own food, even cultivating silk worms to make their distinctive white robes (hence their nickname, the ‘White Ladies’). Communal life occurred through silent meditation in the chapel, five times daily. This way of life was very much Adela Curtis’s vision. This paper will explore Miss Curtis’s innovative communities, and the confluence of late nineteenth-century ideas that joined to forge their ethos.