TAYLOR, FRANCES MARGARET

Foundress of the poor servants of the mother of god; b. Stoke-Rockford, Lincolnshire, England, Jan. 20,

1832; d. London, June 9, 1900. She was the daughter of Henry Taylor, an Anglican minister. After his death (1842) the family moved to Bayswater, London, where it was influenced by the oxford movement. At the age of 16 Fanny followed her elder sister, Emma, into Miss Sellon's Anglican sisterhood, but left after a few months. In 1853 she joined Florence Nightingale's Lady Volunteers and, after training at St. George's Hospital, set out for the Crimea (1854). While serving as nurse there in a hospital ward of Irish Catholic soldiers, she came in contact with Mother Mary Francis Bridgeman and the Sisters of Mercy. On April 14, 1855, she was received into the Catholic Church by Sydney Woollett, SJ, an army chaplain. In 1861 she entered the novitiate of the French Sisters of Charity, Rue de Bac, Paris, but her superiors and Cardinal manning urged her to return to London. There she founded the Poor Servants of the Mother of God (1869) and, as Mother Mary Magdalen, acted as superior general until her death. She was also active as a writer, as editor of the Lamp, and as a collaborator in the start of the periodicals the Messenger of the Sacred Heart and the Month.

Bibliography: j. gillow, A Literary and Biographical History or Bibliographical Dictionary of the English Catholics from 1534 to the Present Time, 5 v. (London-New York 1885–1902; repr. New York 1961) 5:538–539, with list of her writings.

[m. geraldine]