Who Was Elizabeth Prentiss?

Elizabeth Prentiss was born in Portland, Maine, in 1818. Her father, Edward Payson, was a widely known and greatly respected pastor. He died of tuberculosis just before her ninth birthday, and Elizabeth felt this loss deeply. It is recorded that “her constitution was feeble . . . Severe pain in the side, fainting turns, the sick headache, and other ailments troubled her, more or less, from infancy.”¹ Despite her physical issues, she was intelligent, vivacious, and well loved by those who knew her. Her writing talent emerged at a young age, and some of her works were published in The Youth’s Companion, an American children’s magazine.

Though Elizabeth made a profession of faith at age twelve, she experienced a season of doubting her salvation when she was twenty-one. During this time:

her sense of sin, and of her own unworthiness in the sight of God, grew more and more intense and oppressive. At times she abandoned all hope, accused herself of having played the hypocrite, and fancied she was given over to hardness of heart.²

After months of intense spiritual distress, a sermon on Christ’s ability to save to the uttermost brought rest to her weary soul and marked a watershed moment in her faith in Christ as she rested fully in His work on her behalf.

In 1840, she took a teaching position in Richmond, Virginia. Though she was an excellent teacher beloved by her students, the summer heat greatly affected her frail health. Letters written to friends during this time reveal ongoing struggles with (among other things) depression, headaches, angina, body pains, exhaustion, and strange neurological symptoms that no doctor could help her with.

At age twenty-seven, Elizabeth married the Rev. George Prentiss, pastor of South Trinitarian Church in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Elizabeth had always loved babies, and their first child, Annie, was born a year and a half later. Twenty-one months later, their second child, Edward, was born. Baby Eddy had health issues as well, and the sleep deprivation that Elizabeth experienced because of this left a permanent imprint on her health, creating relentless insomnia that she would suffer from for the rest of her life. Though Eddy’s health eventually improved, Elizabeth’s did not. She spent about three days a week in bed with a headache, and the other days she was filled with exhaustion and frailty. But her faith in God’s providence is clear when she writes:

It seems to me I can never recover my spirits and be as I have been in my best days, but what I lose in one way perhaps I shall gain in another. Just think how my ambition has been crushed at every point by my ill-health, and even the ambition to be useful and a comfort to those around me is trampled underfoot, to teach me what I could not have learned in any other school!³

The Prentiss family moved to New York, where George became the pastor of Mercer Street Presbyterian Church. When Elizabeth was six months pregnant with their third child, tragedy struck when Eddy died at the age of four. Elizabeth had not yet recovered when Bessie was born three months later. During this time, Elizabeth herself almost died of a postnatal infection and was quarantined from Bessie, unable to see her newborn child. Tragedy struck again when Bessie died at one month old. Two of her three children had died within three months of each other. In her grief-stricken exhaustion, Elizabeth repeated over and over, “God never makes a mistake. God never makes a mistake.”⁴

To help cope with the grief of losing her children, from 1853 to 1856, Elizabeth wrote children’s books that were published and became widely popular. In 1854, Elizabeth had her fourth child, Minnie, who became critically ill at one year old but survived despite the doctor’s telling the family that she would die. Early in 1857, Elizabeth herself became very ill again, and it appeared as though she was going to die. By this point, Elizabeth longed to go home to be with the Lord, yet her life, as it had been other times, was sustained on the verge of death.

In 1857, she had their fifth child, George. Around this time, her husband, who suffered from some type of chronic fatigue, had become so physically weakened that he had to resign his pastorate. His doctor advised that the family go abroad for a few years so that he could try to regain his strength, and their church raised funds to send the family to Europe. George, Elizabeth, and their three surviving children boarded the ship in 1858. Elizabeth became pregnant again, their son Henry being born when she was forty-one.

These years overseas were not idyllic. While George and Elizabeth were away on a sightseeing trip, they received word that Henry was seriously ill with whooping cough. Minnie and little George caught the disease as well. After that, all three of the children contracted scarlet fever within forty-eight hours of George’s leaving for Paris to take temporary charge of the American chapel there. Elizabeth urged him to stay in Paris, though his absence exacerbated her loneliness and anxiety. After months of quarantine and isolation while caring for her children, the family was finally able to set out for Paris together, though poor weather and ongoing health challenges marked their time there.

After returning to the United States, George, whose health had partially improved, resumed pastoral duties, and Elizabeth, though happy to be home, increasingly suffered from insomnia. Her husband wrote,

It was for Mrs. Prentiss a period of almost continuous ill-health. The sleeplessness from which she had already suffered so much assumed more and more a chronic character, and, aggravated by other ailments and by the frequent illness of her younger children, so undermined her strength, that life became at times a heavy burden.⁵

These years coincided with the American Civil War, a source of great distress for the country. But by 1869, Elizabeth experienced a brief season of health improvement. She eagerly began participating more in church life and writing again. Sharon James notes, “Her years of suffering had equipped her particularly well for a ministry of comfort to the ill and bereaved.”⁶

After initially publishing many children’s books between 1853 and 1856, for ten years she had been unable to write due to poor health. But that season of apparent external fruitlessness had done deep work in her soul, creating mature fruit of patience, hope, faith, and compassion for the suffering of others. She wrote many more children’s books between 1867 and 1874. Her most famous book, however, was written for adults. Stepping Heavenward: One Woman’s Journey to Godliness, was published in 1869 and is still read today. This novel, written in the style of journal entries, follows the life of the main character as she seeks to grow in faith and love for Christ despite all the trials and losses of life.

By 1878, Elizabeth’s husband and friends became concerned that she was seriously unwell. She began to experience dizziness and confessed to the doctor that she’d been experiencing mental confusion all week. A few days later, she was diagnosed with severe gastroenteritis. Elizabeth asked George if he might pray that the Lord would allow her to go to her eternal home. After spending a few more days in extreme pain, Elizabeth died in 1878 at the age of fifty-nine.

Elizabeth Prentiss left behind a legacy of ministry to countless suffering women, devotion to her husband and children, many stories and books that helped others grow in Christ, and the hymn “More Love to Thee.” She did all this despite frequent waves of grief and sorrow, sickness and poor health. Though well-known as a published author, most of her life was spent in the ordinary, and many of her days were filled with her painful medical issues, the grief of the deaths of multiple children, and frequent brushes with death in her immediate and extended family. But by God’s grace, the desire she stated in one of her final letters before her death surely came to pass: “Much of my experience of life has cost me a great price and I wish to use it for strengthening and comforting other souls.”⁷

This article is part of the Historical Figures collection.