Madame Guyon's autobiography was first published in three volumes in Paris in 1720, three years after her death. An English translation of this was published in London in 1897, translated by Thomas Taylor Allen. This is the only unabridged English version of her autobiography.

In 1938, an abridged Chinese translation of Madame Guyon's autobiography was published in China. Throughout the following decades, this book accompanied numerous Chinese Christians as they experienced -- and suffered from -- the political, social and cultural turmoil taking place in China. The book's translator, Yu Chenghua, was a well-respected scholar and Christian elder. Although he later managed to purchase a copy of Allen's English translation, with the hope that he could produce an unabridged Chinese translation of Madame Guyon's autobiography, Yu died in Shanghai in 1956 after being imprisoned and interrogated by the Chinese Communist Party.

The translator of this unabridged Chinese translation, Rachel Ruijie Liu, found a copy of Allen's English translation in 2000. She spent more than 10 years translating it into Chinese, and later published it in the United States. Now, for the first time in electronic format, Liu would like to dedicate this precious book to Chinese Christians across the globe.

About Madame Guyon:

Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de la Motte-Guyon (commonly known as Madame Guyon) (1648-1717) was a French mystic and one of the key advocates of Quietism. As Quietism was considered heretical by the Roman Catholic Church, Madame Guyon was imprisoned from 1695 to 1703, after publishing a book on the topic.

Madame Guyon believed that one should pray all the time, and that in whatever one does, one should be spending time with God. After her death, her most devout disciples were to be found among the Protestants and especially the Quakers. Some Evangelicals were also influenced. Her works were translated into English and German, and her ideas, forgotten in France, have been read in Germany, Switzerland, Great Britain, and America.