Frances Ridley Havergal was an English religious poet and hymnwriter. Take My Life and Let it Be and Thy Life for Me are two of her best known hymns. She also wrote hymn melodies, religious tracts, and works for children. She did not occupy, and did not claim for herself, a prominent place as a poet, but she carved out a niche for herself.
Anne Steele was an English Baptist hymnwriter and essayist. For a full century after her death, she filled a larger place in United States and British hymnals than any other woman.
Caroline Howard Gilman was an American author. Her writing career spanned 70 years and included poems, novels, and essays.
Margaret Elizabeth Sangster was an American poet, author, and editor. Her poetry was inspired by family and church themes, and included hymns and sacred texts. She worked in several fields including book reviewing, story writing, and verse making. For a quarter of a century, Sangster was known by the public as a writer, beginning as a writer of verse, and combining later the practical work of a critic and journalist. Much of her writing did not include her name.
Alexander Keith was a Church of Scotland and Free Church minister, known for his writings on biblical prophecy. Keith interpreted the bible as teaching a premillennial view of Jesus' return and many of his books relate to the place of the Jews and how they relate to Jewish and Christian prophecies in the Bible. Keith, along with Robert Murray M'Cheyne, Andrew Bonar, and Alexander Black visited Palestine on a missionary trip. Taking a faster route home than their other companions Black and Keith passed through Budapest. Keith contracted cholera and nearly died but was influential in setting up a mission to the Jews in Hungary. At the Disruption, Keith sided with the Free Church and continued to minister to a congregation at St Cyrus and to publish works on biblical prophecy.
Annie Hawks was an American poet and gospel hymnist whose compositions number over 400. She contributed to several popular Sunday school hymnbooks, with her best-known song being "I Need Thee Every Hour". Other well-known hymns include "Thine, Most Gracious Lord", "Why Weepest Thou? Who Seekest Thou?", "Full and Free Salvation", and "My Soul Is Anchored".
Annie Maria Barnes was a 19th-century American journalist, editor, and author from South Carolina. At the age of eleven, she wrote an article for the Atlanta Constitution, and at the age of fifteen, she became a regular correspondent of that journal. In 1887, she began publishing The Acanthus, a juvenile paper published in the Southern United States. Barnes published novels from 1887 until at least 1927.
Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church was one of three Methodist organizations in the United States focused on women's foreign missionary services; the two others were the WFMS of the Free Methodist Church of North America and the WFMS of the Methodist Protestant Church.
H. Maria George Colby was an American writer, newspaper editor, and social leader of the long nineteenth century. Her articles appeared in various publications, including the Housewife, Housekeeper, Housekeeper's Weekly, Christian at Work, Demorest's Monthly Magazine, Arthur's Lady's Home Magazine, The Youth's Companion, the Congregationalist, the Portland Transcript, Ladles' World, Good Cheer, The Philadelphia Press, the Chicago Ledger, the Golden Rule, the Household, Good Housekeeping and St. Nicholas Magazine. She served as fashion editor of the Household. Though she used various pen names, including "H. M. G." and "Clinton Montague", her best known literary name was her maiden name, "H. Maria George".
Frances Laughton Mace was an American poet. Her poems first appeared in The Journal of Commerce. She was best remembered for the poem and hymn "Only Waiting", written when she was 18, and published in the Waterville Mail. Its authorship, for a time, was confused. The work was included in her volume Legends, Lyrics, and Sonnets. Her later work was included in Under Pine and Palm (1888) and Wild Roses of Maine (1896). Mace died in 1899.
Jane C. Bonar was a Scottish hymnwriter. Her hymn, "Pass away, earthly joy!", first appeared in 1843 in Songs for the Wilderness. Two years after, it reappeared in The Bible Hymn Book, compiled by her husband, Horatius Bonar, and was reprinted in the United States with other names appended.
Emma A. Cranmer was an American temperance reformer, woman suffragist, and author. A talented suffrage speaker and prohibition representative, she served as president of the South Dakota Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and the South Dakota Equal Suffrage Association. Some of her epigrams were published by the press. Cranmer died in 1937.
"Awake, our drowsy souls" was a Christian hymn by Elizabeth Scott.
Mary Sparkes Wheeler was a British-born American author, poet, and lecturer. She wrote the lyrics to several hymns, including two well-known soldiers' decoration hymns. Her poems were set to music by Professor Sweeney, P. P. Bliss, Kirkpatrick and others. She was the author of Poems for the Fireside (1883), Modern Cosmogony and the Bible (1880), First decade of the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church : with sketches of its missionaries (1883), As it is in Heaven (1906), and Consecration and purity, or, The will of God concerning me (1913).
Abby Fisher Leavitt was an American social reformer and one of the prominent figures of the Ohio Women's Crusade. Leavitt also served as Secretary of the Baptist Women's Foreign Missionary Society of Ohio and Treasurer of the Women's Crusade Temperance Union. She was the leader of the "Praying Band", who, in the spring of 1874, daily marched down to the esplanade of Cincinnati, visiting saloons, and holding meetings inside or outside of liquor saloons, and on one occasion, was arrested and temporarily imprisoned for her temerity. She was a co-publisher of the newspaper of the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). In 1891, as the "Round the World Missionary of the WCTU", the World's WCTU elected Leavitt its life president.
Catharine H. Waterman was an American writer and poet who contributed to the periodical literature. Her publications included books, edited volumes, as well as hymns.
Adelaide Cilley Waldron was an American author and editor of the long nineteenth century. She wrote poems, hymns, sonnets, children's stories, essays, and letters for newspapers, as well as articles for educational and historical journals. Farmington was published in 1904. Waldron was an accomplished musician and a clubwoman. She was associated with the Daughters of the American Revolution, Woman's Christian Temperance Union, New England Woman's Press Association, and other organizations.
Jennie M. Bingham was an American writer and litterateur.
Isadore Gilbert Jeffery was an American writer of Christian poetry and hymn lyrics. Though she wrote prolifically for the religious press, she did not publish a book. For years, she was a constant contributor to The Advance and held a responsible position in the office of that Chicago weekly.
Woman in Sacred Song : a library of hymns, religious poems, and sacred music, by woman is an illustrated book of 880 quarto pages compiled by Eva Munson Smith with preface by Frances E. Willard, first published in 1885 in Boston by D. Lothrop & Company. It contains hymns and nearly 3,000 devotional, missionary, temperance, and miscellaneous poems, the work of about 820 women in the preceding 340 years. There are brief biographies and musical settings, as well as 140 pieces of music.
