11. Harriet Beecher Stowe and Nineteenth-Century Poets and Writers
11
Harriet Beecher Stowe and Nineteenth-Century Poets and Writers
The nineteenth century was a time when women writers flourished. We remember their names and writings today in popular culture, particularly in television, theater, and film. Jane Austen has fared particularly well in recent years with such Hollywood films as Sense and Sensibility (1995, starring Emma Thompson), Emma (1996, starring Gwyneth Paltrow), and Pride and Prejudice (2005, starring Keira Knightley). Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre has also tempted the film industry over the years, as has sister Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.
But nineteenth-century women writers extend far beyond England and Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, and their works encompass much more than fiction only. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mary Shelley, and Christina Rossetti were English poets. Fredrika Bremer was a Swedish novelist and Rosa Campbell Praed, an Australian novelist. Margaret Fuller, an American journalist and feminist writer, was among dozens more who would be listed among the century’s notable writers. Many of these women were born into prosperity and never married, factors that allowed them sufficient leisure time to devote to their passion.
Among them were committed Christians, some of whom made their faith a central feature of their writing or wrote specifically for Christian audiences. Others interacted significantly with writers outside the Christian community. Hannah More was an evangelical social activist who focused her attention on Sunday schools and education, but she was also involved in the antislavery movement, which frequently brought her in contact with William Wilberforce. At the same time she was known for her poetry and her morality plays. Among those in her literary circle were Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke. Had she written a tell-all memoir, she might have piqued curiosity with the account of her six-year engagement to William Turner. When he broke it off, she suffered a mental breakdown, and he was assessed a generous annual annuity for her upkeep—enough to allow her the leisure of a literary life.
The most notable female Christian writers in America during this era, except for Emily Dickinson, are remembered mostly for their popular appeal. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin helped turn the tide against slavery in the years prior to the Civil War, but it was never acclaimed as a literary masterpiece. The same could be said for Fanny Crosby. Her beloved hymn lyrics, however, had staying power and served to bring unity among Christians who might otherwise have been separated by doctrinal differences. Such is also true of Hannah Whitall Smith, whose best-selling devotional book has sold millions of copies since it was first published in 1883.
If only I knew where to find him;
if only I could go to his dwelling!
I would state my case before him
and fill my mouth with arguments.
I would find out what he would answer me,
and consider what he would say to me.
Would he vigorously oppose me?
No, he would not press charges against me.
There the upright can establish their innocence before him,
and there I would be delivered forever from my judge.
But if I go to the east, he is not there;
if I go to the west, I do not find him.
When he is at work in the north, I do not see him;
when he turns to the south, I catch no glimpse of him.
Job 23:3–9
All three of these women were celebrated for their writing in their own lifetimes. Not so Emily Dickinson. Though generally unknown as a poet in her own day, she has since become a literary giant—and one whose words in recent years have been more and more quoted by evangelical Christians.
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE
Literary Abolitionist
The daughter of Lyman Beecher, a fiery Connecticut Calvinist preacher and abolitionist, Harriet was raised primarily by her sister Catherine, eleven years her senior. Their mother was sickly and had died when Harriet was five, and soon thereafter Catherine established the Hartford Female Seminary, where Harriet herself, at sixteen, became a teacher. Several years later the family moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where her father became the first president of Lane Theological Seminary. By this time Harriet was a budding writer. She was invited to join the local Semi-Colon Club, whose members included Judge Salmon P. Chase, who would one day become a Supreme Court justice.
In her midtwenties, she married Calvin Stowe, a professor at the seminary, and in the years that followed, she gave birth to seven children and suffered two miscarriages. Though burdened with family cares, she found time for writing short stories primarily on family matters and domestic concerns. Her husband supported her. “My dear, you must be a literary woman,” he penned in a letter to her. “It is so written in the book of fate.”1
In 1850, more than a dozen years into their marriage, Calvin accepted a faculty position at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. At this same time, Harriet began to take up the cause of abolition. Her younger half sister, Isabella, pleaded with her: “Hattie, if I could use a pen as you can, I would write something that would make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is.”2
It was a tall order to influence a “whole nation,” but Harriet was up to the job. The actual idea for her book came while she was listening to a sermon based on Jesus’s words: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” Later she wrote: “My heart was bursting with the anguish excited by the cruelty and injustice our nation was showing to the slave, and praying God to let me do a little and to cause my cry for them to be heard.”3
Within months Harriet was writing a serialized version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and in 1852 the completed book grabbed the nation’s attention, selling some three hundred thousand copies within a year. The fictionalized story of Uncle Tom and Eliza, a young mother, portrayed the anguish and evils of the institution of slavery far more effectively than did well-argued essays or lectures. Harriet was soon a celebrity with speaking engagements throughout America and Europe. Later when she met President Lincoln in 1862, he would utter his now famous words: “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that led to this great war!” Or did he? Some scholars today argue the quote is apocryphal.
Despite her other books and the soaring sales of Uncle Tom (some two million copies within five years), Harriet did not earn enough to maintain the home she and her husband had built in Hartford. With the sale of that house, they purchased a smaller home that just happened to be across the road from another writer, Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain), who would also have financial problems in later years.
For Harriet, however, money woes were certainly not her first concern. Her adult children struggled with serious problems, not the least of which was morphine addiction. Likewise, she and Calvin had for many years had a rocky marriage. Long separations, particularly due to his travels, did not help matters, nor did Harriet’s aversion to sex due to fear of more pregnancies. In a letter to Calvin, more than a decade into their marriage, she alluded to some of their issues:
One might naturally infer that from the union of two both morbidly sensitive and acute, yet in many respects exact opposites—one hasty and impulsive—the other sensitive and brooding—one the very personification of exactness and routine and the other to whom everything of the kind was an irksome effort—from all this what should one infer but some painful friction. . . . In reflecting upon our future union—our marriage—the past obstacles to our happiness—it seems to me that they are of two or three kinds. 1st those from physical causes both in you and in me—such on your part as hypochondriac morbid instability for which the only remedy is physical care and attention to the laws of health—and on my part an excess of sensitiveness and of confusion and want of control of mind and memory.4
For Calvin’s part, their lack of a physical relationship was the greatest problem between them, and his expectations were high when he returned home. Travel, pregnancies, and Harriet’s fear of more pregnancies left him seriously frustrated, as he penned to her in a letter: “It is almost in fact eighteen months since I have had a wife to sleep with me. It is enough to kill any man, especially such a man as I am.”5
To his credit, Calvin did not appear to be threatened by his wife’s popularity. He was a biblical scholar and promoter of public education in his own right. Soon after her bestseller was published he wrote her a letter that offers insight on their marriage relationship: “Money matters are entirely in your hands, and no money is spent except in accordance with your judgment and that saves me a great deal of torment and anxiety.”6
Both Calvin and Harriet, despite poor health, would live on into old age, he dying at eighty-four, and she a decade later at eighty-five. The saddest aspect of her final years related to her dementia. Only a year or two after Calvin died, due to an “incurable mental malady,” she began “writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin over again,” according to an article in the Washington Post. “She imagined that she was engaged in the original composition, and for several hours every day she industriously used pen and paper, inscribing long passages of the book almost exactly word for word . . . unconsciously from memory.”7
FANNY CROSBY
Blind Hymn Writer
It’s a small world. One of Fanny Crosby’s dearest friends was the hymn writer Phoebe Knapp (daughter of Phoebe Palmer), a wealthy woman some fifteen years younger than she. Fanny often visited her at her New York mansion, where she enjoyed talking with another of Phoebe’s friends, Harriet Beecher Stowe. It was Phoebe who wrote the tune for one of Fanny’s most memorable hymns. Fanny was visiting the Knapp home when Phoebe played a tune she had composed. As the story goes, she asked Fanny, “What do you think the tune says?” Fanny, without hesitation responded: “Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine.” Between 1870 and her death in 1915, Fanny Crosby wrote some eight thousand hymns, many of which are still found in hymnals and continue to be sung today, including “Blessed Assurance,” “Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior,” “Safe in the Arms of Jesus,” “Jesus, Keep Me near the Cross,” “Rescue the Perishing,” and “To God Be the Glory.” Though blind, she wrote of one day seeing—seeing “the bright and glorious morning” and viewing “His blessed face, and the luster of his kindly beaming eye.”
She would later say that she had the good fortune of being blind, a condition she insisted had developed when she was two months old, the result of a hot mustard poultice administered to cure her illness. It is more likely, however, that she was born blind. Perhaps it was her good fortune. With normal sight, she might never have become a hymn writer. Before her first birthday, her father died. From that point on, she was raised primarily by her grandmother while her mother worked. At age fifteen she left home to live at the New York Institution for the Blind, first as a student and later as a teacher. All the while, from girlhood through adulthood, she wrote poetry, publishing her first collection, The Blind Girl and Other Poems, in 1844.
Though raised by a pious Christian grandmother, Fanny did not date her conversion until 1850, when she was thirty years old. She had struggled to break through to God for some time. She attended revival meetings, but nothing happened, as she later wrote in her autobiography:
Some of us went every evening, but although I sought peace, I could not find the joy I craved, until one evening—November 20, 1850—I arose and went forward alone. After prayer the congregation began to sing the grand old consecration hymn of Dr. Isaac Watts:
Alas and did my Saviour bleed?
And did my Sovereign die? Would
He devote that sacred Head
For such a worm as I?
And when they reached the 3rd line of the last verse: “Here, Lord, I give myself away; ’Tis all that I can do.” I surrendered myself to the Saviour, and my very soul was flooded with celestial light. I sprang to my feet, shouting “Hallelujah.”8
As open as she was about her religious experience, Fanny remained mostly silent on her personal life. Eight years after this religious experience, she married Alexander van Alstine, a colleague and former student who was also blind. At thirty-eight, she was eleven years older than Van, as he was known. Of him she wrote: “He was a firm trustful Christian, a man of kindly deeds and cheering words. Our tastes were congenial, and he composed the music to several of my hymns. At different times he was organist in two of the New York Churches; he also taught private classes in both vocal and instrumental music. We were happy together for many years.”9
For most of their married life, however, they lived separately. Another very private matter was the birth of their only child. Of that she later wrote: “God gave us a tender babe, [but soon] the angels came down and took our infant up to God and His throne.”10 In the years that followed the death of her infant, Fanny focused her attention on poetry, particularly the cause of the Civil War, writing one patriotic song after another, some of them with a tone of mockery, as was true in her “Song to Jeff Davis”:
Now, Jeff, when thou art ready,
Lead on thy rebel crew,
We’ll give them all a welcome—
With balls and powder too!
We spurn thy constitution!
We spurn thy southern laws!
Our stars and stripes are waving,
And Heav’n will speed our cause.11
In 1864 Fanny teamed up with William Bradbury, a move that launched her ministry as a hymn writer. For the next four decades until her death in 1915, she wrote as many as seven hymns a day. She was driven, though she testified that she always prayed for inspiration before she began writing. Whether inspired or not, many people were critical of her sentimental and sometimes syrupy lyrics. And it is significant that out of her eight thousand hymn lyrics, fewer than forty would become well known and widely sung.
One of the most popular hymns she wrote was “Pass Me Not”—called for at every meeting of the 1874 Moody-Sankey Campaign in London. Indeed, it was credited with saving more souls than any other hymn. But Fanny did not believe that hymn writing should be her only means of saving souls. In fact, she regarded her rescue mission work at several different locations in New York City as her primary ministry. She found housing near a mission in a low-rent neighborhood and spent little on herself, giving generously to the poor.
When she was in her nineties, she moved to Connecticut to live with a niece. Her admirers made pilgrimages simply to see and talk with the old lady who wrote hymns. It was their good fortune when she would sit at the piano and play for them a favorite, often adding a bit of unexpected rhythm and flare.
EMILY DICKINSON
God-Intoxicated Poet
Whether or not Emily was a bona fide Christian has, over the generations, been a matter of debate. Whether she was a bona fide poet has not. She would never, however, enjoy the popularity of Fanny Crosby, ten years her senior and whose hymns were already gaining popularity during Emily’s lifetime. But Emily’s religious understandings were rooted in the Puritan Calvinism of Jonathan Edwards as opposed to the sentimental Victorian religion that undergirded Fanny’s spiritual life and influenced her hymn writing. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” still reverberated in sermons and in the collective consciousness of Emily’s family and neighbors. Fanny was influenced more by nineteenth-century revivalism. Fanny had postponed her emotional conversion experience until she was thirty. Emily, prompted by philosophical uncertainties, postponed hers altogether.
Twice, however, Emily was nearly caught by the revival fires, the first time in 1846, while she was a student at Amherst Academy, the second time while back home in 1850.
I never lost as much but twice,
And that was in the sod;
Before the door of God!
Angels, twice descending,
Reimbursed my store.
Burglar, banker, father.
I am poor once more.12
Regarding the Amherst revival, to a friend she wrote: “I was almost persuaded to be a Christian. . . . I can say that I never before enjoyed such perfect peace and happiness as the short time in which I felt I had found my savior. But I soon forgot my morning prayer or else it was irksome to me. One by one my old habits returned and I cared less for religion than ever.” In 1850, she wrote to another friend: “How strange is this sanctification, that works such a marvellous change [but left her] standing alone in rebellion and growing very careless.”13
Who was this nineteenth-century poet who wrestled so with religious revivalism and with God? Perhaps the one word that best describes her is honesty. She spoke aloud—in poems and letters—the doubts that others sometimes felt, and she refused to feign an experience just because others were claiming it. Born into a prosperous family in Amherst, Massachusetts, she was the middle of three children. She never married, and except for spending a school year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, she lived her entire life in the family home. In her youth, she was described as a vivacious redhead, but she would spend her adult years largely in seclusion.
Possessed of a brilliant mind, she struggled with matters that are today in the forefront of religious discussions. Many of the questions and issues raised in her poetry and letters relate to the difficulty in correlating religion with new discoveries in science. Her own education included serious academic offerings, though never without religious underpinnings. If geological findings pointed to an ancient earth, well and good, God was all the greater.
But science began to change in 1859, with the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. Emily spoke of such knowledge as so dangerous that “God’s right hand . . . is amputated.”14 Elsewhere she mused in a letter: “We thought Darwin had thrown the Redeemer away.”15 She was giving vent to the incredible emotional toll that Darwin’s theory had taken on those who held fast to God while acknowledging scientific discoveries. The overriding issue was how to read the Book of Nature alongside the Bible.
More than by any particular scientific finding, Emily was troubled by God’s distance and very existence. There was no way, it seems, that she was able to silence the voices inside her that constantly questioned everything she was supposed to take for granted. Like the prophet Job, she wondered where God was hiding and why God was silent. Others claimed to hear his voice, but for her there was deafening silence. Yet like Job she could not succumb to any form of atheism, as is evident in one of her most often-quoted poems:
I know that He exists.
Somewhere—in Silence—
He has hid his rare life
From our gross eyes.16
That Emily was wracked with doubts only served to stimulate her creative genius. Indeed, without her strong religious foundation and critical questioning, her poetry would be spiritually vacuous. Take away from the Bible the book of Job (as well as whole chapters in Psalms and Ecclesiastes), and it is shorn of some of its most provocative and powerful passages. Emily’s uncertainty stands alongside, and in contrast to, Fanny Crosby’s certainty. If Fanny wrote with certainty, “Praise Him, Praise Him,” Emily could write with ambiguity, “I worshipped—did not pray.” By doing so, she allowed herself to come to terms with God’s hiddenness. Indeed, when God is absent in personal prayer, it is no trifling thing to worship in awe.
My period had come for Prayer—
No other Art—would do—
My Tactics missed a rudiment—
Creator—Was it you?
God grows above—so those who pray
Horizons—must ascend—
And so I stepped upon the North
To see this Curious Friend—
His House was not—no sign had He—
By Chimney—nor by Door
Could I infer his Residence—
Vast Prairies of Air
Unbroken by a Settler—
Were all that I could see—
Infinitude—Had’st Thou no Face
That I might look on Thee
The Silence condescended—
Creation stopped—for Me
But awed beyond my errand—
I worshipped—did not “pray”—17
In other poems, Emily almost appears to mock God, or more accurately perhaps the God of Jonathan Edwards and his Puritan forebearers. In her seemingly flippant tone, one can almost imagine her seeing Edwards’s spider dangling over a fire by a thread—as God reprimands happiness that competes with the eternal joys of heaven.
Of God we ask one favor,
That we may be forgiven—
For what, he is presumed to know—
The Crime, from us, is hidden—
Immured the whole of Life
Within a magic Prison
We reprimand the Happiness
That too competes with Heaven.18
To lose one’s faith was surely not something about which to be flippant, and Emily was not. Nor would she have been flippant about losing one’s estate. As a child she may have heard about the Panic of 1837, then as an adult, the Panic of 1857. People lost money and sometimes their entire estates. Bad enough, but one could make a financial comeback. Far worse was the loss of faith, which cannot be regained (“but [only] once—can be”). Such belief that consists of theological propositions (or clauses) is lost forever if even one link in the chain is annihilated, the result being “beggary”—words from her pen so concise and exact.
To lose one’s faith—surpass
The loss of an Estate—
Because Estates can be
Replenished—faith cannot—
Inherited with Life—
Belief—but once—can be—
Annihilate a single clause—
And Being’s—Beggary—19
Did Emily lose her faith? Did she ever have it? Will we see her in heaven one day? Did she even believe there was a heaven? From the first lines of the following poem, it would seem so. But then she takes it all back. Is she chiding those who speak of heaven so blithely when in fact they do not want to go there—at least, not yet? Do they also want to “look a little more at such a curious earth”? And if they actually believe in heaven, why does it often seem like such a humdrum matter? Why does it not, as Emily suggests, take their breath away?
Going to heaven!
I don’t know when. . . .
And yet it will be done
As sure as flocks go home at night
Unto the shepherd’s arm! . . .
If you should get there first,
Save just a little place for me
Close to the two I lost! . . .
I’m glad I don’t believe it,
For it would stop my breath,
And I’d like to look a little more
At such a curious earth!
I’m glad they did believe it
Since the mighty autumn afternoon
I left them in the ground.20
HANNAH WHITALL SMITH
Evangelist with an Unhappy Life
If all the ideas and beliefs and poetry of Fanny Crosby and Emily Dickinson were to be stirred together in a bowl and baked for one hour, the mixture might just come out of the oven as an inedible upside-down cake, a metaphor for Hannah’s dysfunctional family. Her happy Christian spirituality was infused with a family DNA of disabling doubt. Hannah might have been just another nineteenth-century evangelist but for her 1875 best-selling book, The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life (still in print today, long since having passed ten million in sales).
The underlying thesis of the book was not new. Many Christians before Hannah had argued for passivity as opposed to striving for perfection or personal improvement. Like others she used a biblical metaphor to make her point:
In order for a lump of clay to be made into a beautiful vessel, it must be entirely abandoned to the potter, and must lie passive in his hands. And in order for a soul to be made into a vessel unto God’s honor, “sanctified and meet for the Master’s use, and prepared unto every good work,” it must be entirely abandoned to Him, and must lie passive in His hands.21
Born into a prosperous New Jersey Quaker family, Hannah was an independent, precocious child who was determined to let neither gender nor religious restrictions hold her back. Her marriage at age nineteen to Robert Pearsall Smith, also from a long line of influential Quakers, set the stage for her active decades of ministry. Both became Bible teachers, after having shifted their allegiance from the Quakers to a more generic form of evangelicalism, though Hannah would later return to her Quaker roots.
Robert, a preacher and writer in his own right, did not appear to be threatened by Hannah’s preaching or her success as an author. They sometimes worked as a team, other times traveling solo. When Robert was abroad in 1875, he wrote to his son, “All Europe is at my feet.”22 Hannah was more Bible teacher than flamboyant evangelist. His personal spirituality was also far more emotionally charged than hers. During a camp meeting he had an unforgettable baptism of the Holy Ghost. Hannah described it: “Suddenly from head to foot, Robert was shaken with what seemed like a magnetic thrill of heavenly delight, and floods of glory seemed to pour through him, soul and body.”23
Hannah attempted to bring about a similar experience for herself, but to no avail. Indeed, after several attempts, she concluded that she was no more than “a dry old stick.” No doubt referencing Robert as an example, she later concluded that people should be wary of “emotional blessings.” Their emotional and personality differences could also be seen in their marriage. She was strong in the face of adversity; he was weak and prone to nervousness. “My ideal of marriage is an equal partnership, neither one assuming control over the other,” she wrote. “Any marriage other than this is to my mind tyranny on the one hand and slavery on the other.”24
But Hannah did not attempt to build an egalitarian marriage. “I think marriage is a frightful risk,” she confessed. More than that: “I do not like men,” a feeling that seemed to include her son, Logan. She conceded that she “felt in her heart . . . that a boy could never be as valuable and interesting a human being as a girl.” Girls were better than boys: “Daughters are wonderful luxuries . . . well worth a bad husband, at least mine are.”25
That she had a bad husband is well documented. While he was abroad, Hannah received a telegram informing her that he was ill in Paris. She later learned that he had been dismissed from a conference in England. The headlines said it all: “Famous Evangelist Found in Bedroom of Adoring Female Follower.” Robert fell into deep depression and eventually lost his faith. In fact, so lost that he became involved in a long-term romantic affair right under Hannah’s nose with, in her words, “a polished female friend.”26
Although her book expressly implied that she had found the secret to a happy life, it is difficult to imagine Hannah as happy. That only three of her eight children survived to adulthood brought great sorrow and repeatedly tested her faith. “At least I am not now in such a totally hopeless spiritual state as I was last year,” she wrote early in her marriage.27 But she hung on to her faith, even as family members dropped out. Logan would later say that he lost his faith at age eleven, and his sisters would follow after, Mary losing her faith while in college and Alys soon after her marriage to Britain’s most prominent atheist philosopher, Bertrand Russell. It should not be surprising that their marriages would fail as well.
As pained as Hannah was by the wholesale loss of faith, she found solace in her belief in universalism. When Robert died, she was convinced that he had been “safely gathered,” as would her children one day:
As a mother, I will never cease to love my children, no matter what they do. God, our loving God, has a heart of mother-love infinitely greater than mine. He never withholds his love from any sinner, no matter how black-hearted or unrepentant the person may be. His love is completely unconditional. Oh, it is too much. I cannot bear to hear a preacher of the gospel say such limited and untruthful things about the Love of God.28
This doctrine of restitution (or universalism) was very controversial and caused some conference leaders to cancel her speaking engagements. She emphasized, however, that she had not pulled the doctrine out of thin air. She was a Bible teacher (a proof texter, some would say). She argued that Christ had died “for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:2 KJV). The passage she reiterated most often, however, was from the apostle Paul, Philippians 2:10–11: “That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth. And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (KJV).
No doubt her secret to a happy life was based in part on her interpretation and application of these verses. In the end, all would be well.
CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS
I once wrote a poem titled “Fanny Crosby and the Psalms”:
“Redeemed, how I love
to proclaim it.”
O God, do not keep silent
be not quiet.
care for the dying.”
O God, you have
cast us off.
“Draw me nearer,
nearer blessed Lord.”
Why do you stand
afar off, O Lord?
“Blessed assurance
Jesus is mine.”
My God, my God
why have you forsaken me?
“Pass me not O Gentle Savior
hear my humble cry.”
O, my God, I cry in the daytime
but you do not hear.
“And I shall see him
face to face.”
How long will you hide
your face from me?
“I shall know him
I shall know him.”
He who sits in the heavens
shall laugh.
Fanny Crosby is a romantic. The psalmist is a realist. And I love them both, but Fanny Crosby has influenced my spiritual life far more than the psalmist. With my husband it is an even draw. John was born and raised in the Christian Reformed Church. He sang the psalms from his earliest memories. The hymn book for church services was the psalter. No other one would do. Interestingly, though, Fanny Crosby’s hymns and all the other great Victorian hymns were sung in Sunday school.
Despite Fanny’s unblemished outward Christian life, her marriage, for all practical purposes, was broken as were Harriet’s and Hannah’s. Emily, perhaps wisely, remained single.
It is interesting that Emily’s poetic lines often parallel the psalms. What faith she had in God did not come easily. But I suspect that in the chill of her doubts she bloomed as beautifully as does my favorite autumn flower, the purple gentian. I resonate with her as she reflects on her own wintery spirituality—a spirituality conditioned by both nature and nurture, by both her psychological makeup and her surroundings. Like her, I can never be the rose of summer, but through God’s grace I will bloom in frosty weather.
God made a little Gentian—
It tried—to be a Rose—
And failed—and all the Summer laughed—
But just before the Snows—
There rose a Purple Creature—
That ravished all the Hill—
And Summer hid her Forehead—
And Mockery—was still—
The Frosts were her condition—
The Tyrian would not come
Until the North—invoke it—
Creator—Shall I—bloom?29
QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT
Using the metaphor of a flower, are most of the Christians you know more like a summery rose or a frosty gentian? Is one preferable to the other? Which flower best fits Fanny and Hannah? Which flower best fits you?
If you were a poet would you rather write popular verse and be remembered for what many consider dated hymn lyrics or for polished poems that are still included today in literature textbooks? Has either Fanny or Emily influenced your own life?
Of the two women Fanny Crosby and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who do you believe made the greatest and most long-lasting contribution in her writing? Would you rather write a onetime bestseller or a series of beloved hymn lyrics?
Is Hannah’s longing for a glorious onetime spine-tingling spiritual experience a common expression among Christians today? Have you or anyone you know sought to reach such a spiritual high?
How should Christians regard Hannah’s universalism—her likening God to a mother who would never consign a child to hell no matter how disobedient the child was? Have beliefs about hell become less well-defined and more metaphorical in recent decades? What do you believe about hell? Do you assume that most people you encounter in your daily life are headed there?
If these four women were somehow brought together today for an extended period of time, what would they have in common besides their writing? How do you think their relationships would develop?