"Caroline E. Stephen (1834-1909) a Friend by convincement, was a member of the Stephen family, prominent in England and well-known in other countries for several generations. Her father was Sir James Stephen and her brothers, James Fitzjames and Leslie Stephen, the latter being the father of Virginia Woolf.

"To the study of Quakerism, Caroline Stephen brought the judgment of an intellectual person who came into contact with the Society of Friends at a mature age, after having closely analyzed her own position in regard to religion and the church.

"In Quaker Strongholds, as in her other writings, she seems to keep constantly in mind the points of view of those to whom Quakerism is new and strange and of those well-versed in its belief and practice, making a kind of bridge between them. She makes a bridge, also, between the early and the modern in Quaker thought, her candid and fearless analyses seeming in many instances to belong to our own time, rather than to that in which she wrote."

From the Introduction.

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