A cache of letters and diaries recovers the remarkable lost story of a firebrand woman preacher in China who rescued a day-old baby girl she had found abandoned on a rubbish dump and raised her as her own

I had never heard of the Bible Christians until my husband Andy started researching his family history. Among his ancestors were ministers of this radical Church, which had broken away from Methodism in 1815. The Bible Christians began in the West Country and their firebrand preachers drew huge crowds with their message that all were equal before God. Fearing insurrection among their workers, landlords on the Isle of Wight, in league with Anglican priests, forced the Church underground for a time so that they had to meet secretly in workers’ cottages. Some of their leading lights were women, known as “Female Special Agents”. One woman in particular spoke to us across the generations.

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