'Though Anna studied pious works almost constantly, she almost never commented in her diary on her religious reading ... Anna's daily examination of the scriptures or of a religious work was a private act of self scrutiny intended to strengthen her moral resolve and Christian faith... It was not a subject for polite conversation, like so much other material... In the 1790s she was still reading the sermons that she had first encountered twenty years earlier. In short, she conformed to the model of the isolated, absorbed, individual reader, cut off from the world by her immersion in the text.'