Sarah Evans

Sarah Evans (1765-1845) was the daughter of Caleb Evans and Sarah Jeffries Evans. She was J. J. Evans’s older sister. She never married, living most of her life after the death of her father in 1791 with various relations, including her uncle Thomas Mullett and, for the final thirty years of her life, with Mary Anne Mullett Evans in London, Melksham (1815-27), and Bristol (1827-45).  Sarah Evans became friends with Mary Steele in the 1770s and later knew Steele’s two half-sisters, Anne and Martha. Jane Evans writes of her aunt Sarah:  ‘Her intellect was remarkably clear; she was timid and diffident of herself and tender in her judgment of others, but displayed no small degree of moral courage when duty called her to speak unpleasant truths or to oppose the will of those she loved.’ For references to Sarah Evans in Mary Steele’s correspondence, see Timothy Whelan, ed., Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840, 8 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), 3.302, 311, 359-60; for comments by Jane Evans, see Jane Mullett Evans, Family Chronicle of the Descendants of Thomas Evans, of Brecon, from 1678 to 1857 (Bristol: privately printed, c.1870), 37.