A period musical about Shaker history might not seem like an obvious choice for a breakout hit, but that’s exactly what The Testament of Ann Lee has become. Starring Amanda Seyfried in an award-magnet performance, the film is earning chatter as much for its ecstatically choreographed musical numbers as for its resurrection of underexplored, feminist religious leader Ann Lee.
Lee (Seyfried) was the organizing force behind the Shakers, a radical branch of Christianity birthed in 18th-century England. After an early life marked by poverty and loss, she became Mother Ann Lee, the leading voice of Shaker theology. Everything from Shakerism’s belief in gender equality and a dual-gendered God to the practice of celibacy can be traced back to her teachings. Then, in 1774, Lee and a small group of followers took the movement to America—a movement that, by many accounts, painted Lee as the second coming of Jesus Christ.
The Testament of Ann Lee’s director, Mona Fastvold, who cowrote the screenplay with partner and collaborator Brady Corbet, faithfully captures a lot of these details. But there’s creative license taken, too, and understandably so.
Lee was illiterate, meaning she never recorded any of her life in print. Most writings about her—including the foundational Shaker text, Testimonies of the Life, Character, Revelations and Doctrines of Mother Ann Lee, and the Elders With Her (1816)—were published well after her death, blurring the line between historical fact and later mythmaking. Fastvold, whose research included exploring Shaker archives, has been careful to describe the film as a “speculative retelling” of Lee’s life.
So, which parts of the movie are rooted in history, and which are the speculative stuff of Lee lore? Below, we’ll explore where The Testament of Ann Lee focuses on fact and where it starts playing with fiction.
What is the true story of Ann Lee?
Lee was born on February 29, 1736, in Manchester, England, a city on the cusp of major economic and religious change. The second oldest of eight children in a poor family, she was put to work at a young age, laboring in a textile mill and as a cook at a Manchester infirmary.
We don’t know a lot about Lee’s day-to-day life during these early years, but we can trace the larger forces in the world around her.
In Manchester, as in other parts of England, rising industrialization, accompanied by few protections for laborers, was dramatically reshaping everyday life. This social and economic transformation, scholars suggest, also helped create the conditions for new religious movements to take hold. By the mid-18th century, England was in the grip of the Evangelical Revival, a movement that bypassed traditional Church of England authority in favor of personal, emotional encounters with God.
Revivalist preachers like George Whitefield traveled widely, preaching outside of formal churches and drawing major crowds. Their message—that anyone can access spiritual truth from God directly—is one Lee may have been exposed to from a young age.
Against this backdrop, in her early 20s, Lee began attending meetings hosted by James and Jane Wardley. The Wardleys had split off from mainstream Quakerism in the late 1740s. Like the Camisards—a persecuted group of French religious rebels thought to be a source of inspiration for the Wardleys—they practiced an ecstatic, highly physical form of worship. At times involving falling to the floor and shaking, it earned the Wardleys’ group the derisive nickname “the Shaking Quakers.” Like the Quakers before them, the group also allowed women an unusual degree of religious authority. Jane Wardley preached and even prophesied that Jesus Christ would return as a woman.
Though she joined the group in 1758, Lee’s role as a leader would come later. In 1762, she married Abraham Standerin, a blacksmith. According to some Shaker and Shaker-affiliated accounts, Lee hadn’t wanted to marry but was forced or pressured into the arrangement. Together, the couple would have four children—all of whom died young. (There’s some disagreement over whether all four died in infancy or whether one of the four lived to age six.) A widely cited scholarly history of Shakerism says Lee saw these deaths as a “series of judgments” for having sex, driving her to avoid sleeping with her husband. (In the 19th-century Testimonies, Lee’s “great abhorrence of the fleshly cohabitation of the sexes”) is given an earlier origin in childhood.)
Around this time, according to the 19th-century Shakers: Compendium, compiled by Frederick William Evans, a Shaker and theologian, Lee underwent a period of spiritual reckoning that frequently involved “heavenly visions and Divine revelations.” She began to assume a more vocal role in the Wardleys’ group. The “Shakers,” as they came to be called, were turning to bold tactics to draw attention to their teachings. These included nonviolent but disruptive forms of protest, like entering and loudly denouncing established church services. Accounts differ on how many times Lee and fellow Shakers were arrested for this behavior. The Shaker Heritage Society describes more than one arrest in Manchester, as well as a period of confinement in a mental institution. Other sources focus on one specific arrest in 1770.
According to Shaker teachings, Lee’s 1770 imprisonment marked a turning point. There, she is said to have experienced a vision of Adam and Eve revealing sex as the original source of all human sin. Lee left prison ready to teach; later accounts point to this period as when the title “Mother” Ann Lee first appeared. Assuming leadership of the Shakers, Lee made celibacy a requirement of the faith going forward.
In 1774, following the imprisonment and vision that solidified her leadership, Lee is said to have had another vision telling her to take Shakerism to America. According to the 1859 Compendium, that vision took the form of a shining tree, representing the Shakers’ church to be built in America. Another member of her circle, James Whittaker, reported a vision of similar meaning, according to Testimonies. On May 19, 1774, Lee and eight followers, including her husband and her brother William, sailed from Liverpool to New York City. (Standerin wouldn’t stay part of the crew for long; early into life in America, he separated from Lee, something Testimonies attributes to his dissatisfaction with celibacy.)
Within a few years, the group, known formally as the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, or Believers, established its first US settlement in upstate New York. From this new community just north of Albany, in an area called Niskayuna (later Watervliet), Lee preached and set the rhythm for the Shakers’ daily life.
Under her leadership, Shaker society was organized around values like simplicity, spiritual equality between all people, confession of sins, and shared labor and property, with practices like celibacy and communal living understood as paths for striving toward spiritual perfection. Alongside farming, they supported themselves through skilled craftsmanship, perhaps most notably by a trademark style of furniture, a tradition that would live on.
With the first community settled, Lee and Shaker elders traveled throughout New England to preach and attract converts, reportedly never requiring financial contributions from new members. By the 1780s, Shaker settlements in other parts of New England, like Mount Lebanon, New York, and Harvard, Massachusetts, were forming. But, although their numbers were still small, the group had started to attract unwanted attention.
The Shakers’ commitment to pacifism quickly put them at odds with the world around them: Lee and her followers had arrived in America less than a year before the Revolutionary War broke out. As pacifists, Shakers refused to support either side of the conflict, managing to keep a low profile at first, according to Albany’s Shaker Heritage Society. That changed when at least one member of the group was arrested under suspicion of attempting to bring sheep to the British.
According to the society, locals had become suspicious of the group of British immigrants, led unconventionally by a woman. Mistrust of the group’s pacifism was made worse by dislike of the exuberant way they worshipped. Rumors swirled that Lee was a British spy, or even that she was a witch. Per the society, when Lee encouraged others not to take up arms, she and multiple Believers were imprisoned until New York governor George Clinton ordered their release.
Despite mounting attacks from outside communities, under Lee’s leadership, the movement forged on. Its central beliefs—that faith should be lived out through peace, full equality, and collective labor—were finding a small but growing audience. A commitment to a truly equal society meant that Black Americans became Shakers as early as 1790, according to Albany’s Shaker Heritage Society, and that the group’s views on gender equality, stemming from its belief that God is both male and female, promised women converts more agency than they could find in mainstream society.
How did Ann Lee die?
Accounts of the circumstances surrounding Lee’s death vary. Several point to the cumulative toll of repeated assaults, in addition to the physical demands of missionary work, as Lee and Shaker elders traveled through hostile towns, preaching and seeking new converts. Decades after her death, Lee’s body was exhumed. A skull fracture, which some accounts posit was the result of a particularly brutal mob attack, and evidence of other broken bones was reportedly found.
Although specifics differ by account, across Shaker tradition, there is evidence that Lee endured violence, while in England and in the final years of her life across the Atlantic. By some accounts, in Massachusetts, a mob forced her into a sleigh and stripped her to “prove” she wasn’t a man. Wartime suspicion played a role, but it was far from the only source of hostility. Some, for example, believed women and children were being held against their will in Shaker communities.
Lee died in 1784 at the age of 48, less than two months after her brother William, who, per Shaker writings, had also suffered physical attacks. At the time of her death, Lee is reported to have said: “I see Brother William coming, in a golden chariot, to take me home.”
What does The Testament of Ann Lee get wrong about Ann Lee and the Shakers?
Fastvold has been candid about how messy it is to separate fact from lore in Lee’s story. To prepare for the film, she went into a “research rabbit hole,” according to Entertainment Weekly, but as she told the news outlet, she knew she wasn’t “making a documentary; it’s fiction. Ultimately, you have to let the characters come alive and start telling you where they wanna go."
To bring Lee to life, Shaker teachings are often incorporated into the film at face value, and legend is purposefully leaned into. Corbet says this choice to ground the film in the Shakers’ own image of Lee was intentional. In the film’s press notes, he explains: “We thought that the most radical thing we could do was take their testament quite seriously as opposed to deconstructing it with a cynical or very contemporary sort of perspective.” The resulting movie is a blend of historical record, teachings of the Shaker faith, legend, and the filmmakers’ creative interpretations. Examples of where fact and fiction start to blur include:
In the film’s telling, growing up in a single-room household as part of a family of 10 meant Lee frequently witnessed her parents’ sexual activity, stoking a lifelong rejection of physical intimacy. It’s not a leap to suppose this could have happened, but there’s no reference to it in the historical record or in Shaker teachings.
That said, some Shaker texts do trace Lee’s view of sex as sinful to her youth. Testimonies says that Lee “admonished her mother against” the “lusts of the flesh,” sparking a violent reaction from her father, something the film incorporates. Compendium also says that, as a child, Lee spoke to her mother about the “odiousness of sin, especially the impure and indecent nature of sexual coition for mere gratification.”
According to Compendium, it wasn’t until Lee was imprisoned as an adult that, through a vision of Adam and Eve, her belief that celibacy was necessary for salvation coalesced into “open testimony.” Testimonies points to 1770 as the date Lee received this “full revelation.” One early work of Shaker history suggests she may have preached celibacy earlier, before she was imprisoned. A more modern scholarly account also states that the tragedies of losing her four children “strongly conditioned her views toward sex and the institution of marriage.”
In a dramatic prison scene, Lee pleads for her release before a chief magistrate and several ministers from Christ Church, a Church of England parish whose clergy represented the religious establishment the Shakers challenged. As the film’s narrator—Mary Partington (played by Thomasin McKenzie), a real member of the group Lee brought to America—tells us, legend has it, that Lee astonishes her captors by speaking anywhere from 12 to 72 languages, persuading them to free her.
Compendium includes this anecdote. In that telling, Lee’s ability to speak “72 different tongues” satisfied the clergymen. But when those officials told a mob to leave her alone as a result, the members became “disappointed and enraged” and attempted to stone her and her followers to death. As with many episodes from Lee’s life, posthumous Shaker texts—like Compendium, published 75 years after her death—are seemingly the earliest recorded sources, making it hard for historians to independently verify these events.
This one’s tricky, since it wades into nuanced corners of Shaker theology. Plenty of sources claim Lee was viewed as a “female Christ” in her lifetime. Of these sources, many focus on describing Lee as being “received” this way, without clearly addressing whether Lee believed or taught this herself. None of these accounts was written while Lee was alive.
According to the modern-day Shakers of Maine, Lee “was not Christ, nor did she claim to be.” They describe her as having been a vessel for Christ: “Mother’s attitude toward her own role is related more than once in her own [recorded] sayings, ‘It is not I that speaks; it is Christ who dwells in me.’” Other sources focus on Lee less as a “female Jesus” and more as an expression of divine femininity. An early 20th-century work by two Shaker women describes Lee as being endowed with “Divine Maternity” and the “Maternal Spirit of God.” Other accounts suggest she saw herself as a prophet, predicting Christ’s return as a woman.
The movie itself leans on this ambiguity. In one scene, Lee tells congregants that Christ “dwells in me,” calls him her “lover,” and describes herself as “married to the Lord Jesus Christ.”
While movement is undeniably a part of Shakers’ religious life and style of worship, the film’s expansive and highly synchronized dance sequences—set to music adapted from real Shaker hymns—are a modern interpretive choice.
Although the original Quaking Shakers did practice a spontaneous form of physical worship, Shaker dances soon shifted to a shared choreography. Restrained, repetitive, and disciplined rather than expressive, these dances were referred to as “laboring.” By one 20th-century Shaker account, the movements became a march more so than a dance, featuring a “graceful, rhythmic motion of the hands as the members marched to the slow or quick tempo of the music.” Musical instruments weren’t used, and the earliest Shaker songs used syllables instead of language. (Lyrics were adopted as the religion grew in America.)
In whatever form their dance and song took, we know many outsiders saw this style of worship as strange and even threatening, contributing to hostile attitudes toward Shakers.
Is the Shaker religion still active?
The Shakers are considered one of America’s longest-lived religious movements and among its most enduring utopian experiments. Technically, more than 250 years after Lee’s voyage to America, the faith still exists. But it's hard to keep a religion alive when refusal to procreate is a core belief.
Without new members born into the group, Shakers have always had to rely on conversions through missionary work to grow their ranks. For decades after Lee’s death, that method continued to work. By the mid-1800s, there were at least 19 Shaker settlements across the Northeast, as well as states like Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and Florida, with estimates placing the number of members living within these communities at anywhere from 4,000 to 6,000.
After the Civil War, though, membership started to decline. An age of industrialization and mass production meant it was becoming increasingly hard for Shakers to sell their crafts, and young members were tempted away by new business opportunities, according to Ken Burns’s documentary on the group. By the late 1950s, it was estimated that just two dozen Shakers were left, and in 1965, the group’s lead ministry made the decision to stop admitting new "covenanted" members, according to the Los Angeles Times, something not all Shakers observed.
Some saw the decline as just a part of Lee’s vision. Speaking from one of the last two communities in the late 1980s, a Shaker “eldress” told the L.A. Times that Lee herself had prophesied the Shakers “would diminish to as many as a child could count on one hand, and then there would be a revival of the spirit.”
Today, just one active Shaker community in the US—the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in Maine—remains. In 2025, one new member joined, raising the total number of practicing Shakers in the US to three. At an anniversary conference marking Lee’s arrival in New York, the last remaining Shaker elder, Brother Arnold Hadd, told those gathered: “We’ve survived 250 years. We are looking forward as much as our ancestors did to the next—whatever that involves. All we have to do is be ready.”
