Her career spanned more than three decades, a remarkable achievement for any woman writer at that time. Given the sparse amount of remuneration her husband received as pastor at Great Gransden and the loss of at least at portion of that income after his death, Dutton most likely used monies from the sale of her works to supplement her meagre income, qualifying her as an early example of a professional woman writer. She was aided by her connections with a select coterie of dissenting printers and booksellers, which included John Oswald, Ebenezer Gardner, John Hart, John Lewis, Samuel Mason, and George Keith. Hart was Dutton’s sole printer from 1742 through 1762, and Lewis was her primary seller from 1743-54. Lewis corresponded with Dutton in the 1740s and was instrumental in presenting her works to the public and to the followers of Whitefield in England, Wales, Scotland, and America through his work at various times as editor, printer, and seller of The Christian Amusement (1740-41), The Weekly History (1741-42), An Account of the Most Remarkable Particulars relating to the Present Progress of the Gospel (1742-43), and The Christian History (1743-48). For more on Dutton's printers and booksellers, click here. 

Dutton's writings appeared in nearly 70 volumes during her lifetime, with another 25 separate compositions embedded in those volumes. She published 18 volumes of her letters and several formal discourses, many as formal letters, on important doctrines of Calvinism, such as assurance of salvation, justification, election, adoption, and genuine evangelical piety. A number of her works were polemical in nature, patterned after the thought and style of Calvinistic preachers of the Great Awakening she admired and with whom she corresponded, such as George Whitefield. Dutton’s canon of work encompasses many of the dominant genres popular among religious writers of the eighteenth century: personal diary, spiritual autobiography, hymns, long narrative poems, letters, and formal religious discourse and treatises. She was an ardent opponent of Wesley’s Arminianism.  Among her more popular works are A Narration of the Wonders of Grace, in Verse (1734), Letters on Spiritual Subjects, and Divers Occasions (1747), and A Brief Account of the Gracious Dealings of God with the Late Mrs. Anne Dutton (1750).  For her complete bibliography, click here. 

It has long been believed that Anne Dutton bequeathed her personal bible to the Baptist hymn writer and poet, Anne Steele (1717-78) of Broughton, Hampshire. If true, the act would have created a conscious connection between the two Baptist women writers who shared a common heritage as Baptists as well as a “calling” to be writers. Unfortunately, the story is not true. It came to her most likely as gift from John Collins, an antiquarian and book collector from Devizes who joined the Broughton Baptist Church in 1765, the same year Dutton died. He acquired the bible from Dutton or her estate (her library and that of her husband was given to the Great Gransden Church) and at some later date gave it to Steele, who prompt

Anne Dutton was not only the most prolific woman writer of the eighteenth century but, among Baptist women, she was also among the most daring in asserting her right to publish her works for a transatlantic readership among dissenters and evangelicals. Some of her works were even addressed to a particular congregation of believers, such as George Whitefield’s Tabernacle in London or a group of converted enslaved persons on a South Carolina plantation. What is even bolder, however, and unprecedented in Baptist women’s history of the eighteenth century is her act of keeping the church minute book for the Baptist meeting in Great Gransden after the departure of her husband for America in 1743. He drowned upon his return to England in 1747, prompting her to make one of boldest moves, which was to assume her deceased husband’s role as keeper of the church book and, by default, filling his position among the leaders of the congregation at church meetings where matters of business for the congregation and cases of discipline for individual members were examined. At that time in Baptist congregations, women were not allowed in positions of leadership and would never have been allowed to keep and maintain the church book. Anne Dutton broke through that barrier in 1743, demonstrating her determination to continue the sense of shared ministry she brought to Great Gransden with her husband in 1732. She would continue to compose the entries for the book until 1759, having survived three short pastorates during that time before the ministry of Timothy Keymer began in 1755. Surprisingly, Keymer did not make an entry in the book until after 1759, the year following his ordination, which suggests that Dutton kept the book in her possession until that time. For the complete transcript of her unprecedented work as keeper of the Church Book at Great Gransden between 1743 and 1759, click here.