A Glimpse at Elizabeth Prentiss
A Glimpse at Elizabeth Prentiss
In attempting to sum up the characteristics of her writings, her husband George Prentiss wrote the following:
First, and most prominent, was their purpose. Her pen moved always and only under a sense of duty. She held her talent as a gift from God and consecrated it sacredly to the enforcement and diffusion of His truth. If I may quote once more the words of her publisher in his tribute to her memory—“her great desire and determination to educate in the highest and best schools was never overlooked or forgotten. She never, like many writers of religious fiction, caught the spirit of sensationalism that is in the air, or sought for effects in unhealthy portraiture, corrupt style, or unnatural combinations.”
Second, she was unconventional. Her writings were not religious in any stereotyped, popular sense. Her characters were not stenciled. The holiest of them were strongly and often amusingly individualized. She did not try to make automatons to repeat religious commonplaces, but actual men and women, through whose very peculiarities the Holy Spirit revealed His presence and work.
Third, I have already referred to her sprightliness. [in a previous section.] She had naturally a keen sense of humor which overflowed both in her conversation and in her books. She saw nothing in the nature of the faith she professed which bade her lay violent hands on this propensity; and she once said that if her religion could not stand her saying a funny thing now and then it was not worth much. But, whatever she might say or write of this character, one never felt that it betrayed any irreverent lightness of spirit. The undertone of her life was so deeply reverential, so thoroughly pervaded with adoring love for Christ, that it made itself felt through all her lighter moods, like the ground-swell of the sea through the sparkling ripples on the surface.
Fourth, her style was easy, colloquial, never stilted or affected, marked at times by an energy and incisiveness which betrayed earnest thought and intense feeling. She aimed to impress the truth, not her style, and therefore aimed at plainness and directness. Her hard common sense, of which her books reveal a goodly share, was offset by her vivid fancy which made even the region of fable tributary to the service of truth.
Fifth, her books were intensely personal; expressions, I mean, of her own experience. Many of her characters and scenes are simple transcripts of fact, and much of what she taught in song, was a repetition of what she had learned in suffering.
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