Biography
Elizabeth Payson was born on October 26, 1818, in Portland, Maine. She was the daughter of Edward Payson, the great pastor of the Second Congregational Church, and she grew up in a home of prayer and intensity. Her father died when she was nine, after a long illness, and she held on to his memory all her life. She was a quick child with a sharp wit, and she loved to write. She was also a sensitive girl, given to fits of temper and to deep feelings of guilt.
She was educated at schools in Portland and in Ipswich, Massachusetts, and for a time she taught in a girls' school. As a young woman she wrote poems, essays and stories. In 1845, she married George Lewis Prentiss, a young Presbyterian minister who later became a professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York. The two were happy together, and their marriage lasted over thirty years. They lived in New York City and in a summer home in Dorset, Vermont.
Her life was marked by suffering. She endured chronic illness throughout her adult years, and she suffered from headaches, nervous exhaustion and other afflictions. She also lost two of her children in infancy. The death of her first child, in particular, broke her heart. She went through long periods of grief and doubt and said that she turned to God because she had nowhere else to go. She wrote her way through the sorrow, and her writing carried the weight of experience.
Her books were widely read in her day. She wrote several works for children, including the Little Susy series, which told of a small girl's life and death in a loving home. These books were sold in the hundreds of thousands. But her best-known work was Stepping Heavenward, published in 1869. It is a novel in the form of a diary, written by a young woman named Katy, who tells of her struggles with temper, pride and selfishness, and of her growth in grace through marriage, motherhood and loss. The book was a surprise success and was translated into many languages. It spoke to ordinary women who recognized themselves in the heroine.
She also wrote a hymn, More Love to Thee, which she composed in a time of great sorrow and which was later set to music and sung in churches across the world. She wrote it at a moment of grief, and she did not share it for years. When it was published, it moved many people.
She was a woman of strong feeling, and her letters reveal her struggles. She often wrote of her sense of failure and of her dependence on Christ. She did not claim to be a saint. Her friends spoke of her humor, her warmth and her deep kindness. She was also loyal to her father's memory and wrote a memoir of his life.
She died on August 13, 1878, in Dorset, Vermont, at the age of fifty-nine. Her husband wrote a biography of her life that was widely read. Her work shows the way that a woman can use her gifts and her pain to help others. She wrote about the ordinary life of a Christian woman with honesty, and in doing so, she helped many to see that the road to heaven is walked in daily duties.