Turning Suffering into Hope: The Life of Elizabeth Prentiss (1818-1878)
Had social media existed in the nineteenth century, Elizabeth Prentiss’s letters would have amassed likes. Ironically, her writing was birthed in suffering. A chronic insomniac—with accompanying exhaustion, irritability, and depression, she once commented: “I never knew what it was like to feel well.” Still, people judged her as positive, winsome, and funny . . . and they avidly read her stories.
All her life, Elizabeth experienced challenges. Her beloved pastor-father died of tuberculosis when she was nine. No longer eligible for parish housing, she moved from Maine to New York and worked at the girls’ school that her older sister had founded. After her graduation, she taught school in Virginia until her career ended suddenly, when the headmaster’s wife died and funds for salaries dried up.
In 1845, at age twenty-seven, Elizabeth’s life changed yet again, for she married George L. Prentiss, a pastor from New Bedford, MA. Elizabeth loved serving alongside a man she greatly admired. The second Prentiss pastorate was in New York City, and here Elizabeth gave birth to her first three children, two girls and a boy. While she was still pregnant with her second daughter, three-year old Eddy caught meningitis and died. Then more tragedy followed, because her newborn daughter only lived for five weeks. In her grief Elizabeth, for the first time since her teen years, turned to writing fiction. This produced two bestsellers—both with a protagonist named “Little Suzy.”
George Prentiss next accepted a pastorate in Vermont. Even though Elizabeth had two more children, she kept teaching Bible classes and writing both letters and popular fiction. Elizabeth also penned her most famous work, the semi-autobiographical Stepping Heavenward, which traces the life of heroine Kate from her teenage years to her untimely death at the age of forty. Kate learns to strive for excellence, to laugh, and to view her struggles as trusts from her Savior. Her are two quotations from among Kate’s journal entries:
● There is no wilderness so dreary but that His love can illuminate it, no desolation so desolate but that He can sweeten it . . . the highest, purest happiness is . . . earned with Christ in sickrooms, in poverty, in racking suspense and anxiety, amid hardships, and at the open grave.
● Go home and say to yourself, “I am a wayward, foolish child. But He loves me! I have disobeyed and grieved Him ten thousand times. But He loves me! I . . . do not love Him, I am even angry with Him! But He loves me!”
What I personally like about Stepping Heavenward is that presents not only engaging story but also the daily challenge of living for Christ. Even though Elizabeth died nine years after the Stepping Heavenward was published, her novel remains popular today.
Not generally known for her poetry, Elizabeth’s one exception is “More Love to Thee,” an autobiographical lyric she penned after her two children’s tragic deaths. Thirteen years after she wrote that poem, Cincinnati businessman and songwriter William H. Doane composed an accompanying tune and included “More Love to Thee” in his 1870 collection of Sunday School songs. A four-stanza hymn, the first and third stanzas are especially poignant as they proclaim:
More love to Thee, O Christ, more love to Thee!
Hear Thou the prayer I make on bended knee;
This is my earnest plea: More love, O Christ, to Thee;
More love to Thee, more love to Thee!
Let sorrow do its work, come grief or pain;
Sweet are Thy messengers, sweet their refrain,
When they can sing with me: More love, O Christ, to Thee;
More love to Thee, more love to Thee!
Clearly, the phrase “more love for thee” dominates this hymn, and for good reason. Life for Elizabeth was hard, and she learned to lean on God to fill her voids, provide for her needs, and enable her hope. Profound suffering produced more love for her Maker. Pain turned into joy.
