In this restful and happy home, after a brief illness, Mrs. Gurney died in early womanhood, leaving eleven children, all young, the smallest but two years old.  Elizabeth was twelve, old enough to feel the irreparable loss.  To the day of her death the memory of this time was extremely sad.

She was a nervous and sensitive child, afraid of the dark, begging that a light be left in her room, and equally afraid to bathe in the sea.  Her feelings were regarded as the whims of a child, and her nervous system was injured in consequence.  She always felt the lack of wisdom in “hardening” children, and said, “I am now of opinion that my fear would have been much more subdued, and great suffering spared, by its having been still more yielded to:  by having a light left in my room, not being long left alone, and never forced to bathe.”

After her marriage she guided her children rather than attempt “to break their wills,” and lived to see happy results from the good sense and Christian principle involved in such guiding.  In her prison work she used the least possible governing, winning control by kindness and gentleness.

Elizabeth grew to young womanhood, with pleasing manners, slight and graceful in body, with a profusion of soft flaxen hair, and a bright, intelligent face.  Her mind was quick, penetrating, and original.  She was a skilful rider on horseback, and made a fine impression in her scarlet riding-habit, for, while her family were Quakers, they did not adopt the gray dress.

She was attractive in society and much admired.  She writes in her journal:  “Company at dinner; I must beware of not being a flirt, it is an abominable character; I hope I shall never be one, and yet I fear I am one now a little....  I think I am by degrees losing many excellent qualities.  I lay it to my great love of gayety, and the world....  I am now seventeen, and if some kind and great circumstance does not happen to me, I shall have my talents devoured by moth and rust.  They will lose their brightness, and one day they will prove a curse instead of a blessing.”

Before she was eighteen, William Savery, an American friend, came to England to spend two years in the British Isles, preaching.  The seven beautiful Gurney sisters went to hear him, and sat on the front seat, Elizabeth, “with her smart boots, purple, laced with scarlet.”

As the preacher proceeded, she was greatly moved, weeping during the service, and nearly all the way home.  She had been thrown much among those who were Deists in thought, and this gospel-message seemed a revelation to her.

The next morning Mr. Savery came to Earlham Hall to breakfast.  “From this day,” say her daughters, in their interesting memoir of their mother, “her love of pleasure and the world seemed gone.”  She, herself, said, in her last illness, “Since my heart was touched, at the age of seventeen, I believe I never have awakened from sleep, in sickness or in health, by day or by night, without my first waking thought being, how best I might serve my Lord.”