Elizabeth Prentiss left behind a legacy of ministry to countless suffering women, devotion to her husband and children, many stories and books that helped others grow in Christ, and the hymn “More Love to Thee.” She did all this despite frequent waves of grief and sorrow, sickness and poor health. Though well-known as a published author, most of her life was spent in the ordinary, and many of her days were filled with her painful medical issues, the grief of the deaths of multiple children, and frequent brushes with death in her immediate and extended family.
Elizabeth Prentiss was born in Portland, Maine, in 1818. Her father, Edward Payson, was a widely known and greatly respected pastor. He died of tuberculosis just before her ninth birthday, and Elizabeth felt this loss deeply. It is recorded that “her constitution was feeble . . . Severe pain in the side, fainting turns, the sick headache, and other ailments troubled her, more or less, from infancy.”1 Despite her physical issues, she was intelligent, vivacious, and well loved by those who knew her. Her writing talent emerged at a young age, and some of her works were published in The Youth’s Companion, an American children’s magazine.
Though Elizabeth made a profession of faith at age twelve, she experienced a season of doubting her salvation when she was twenty-one. During this time:
her sense of sin, and of her own unworthiness in the sight of God, grew more and more intense and oppressive. At times she abandoned all hope, accused herself of having played the hypocrite, and fancied she was given over to hardness of heart.2
After months of intense spiritual distress, a sermon on Christ’s ability to save to the uttermost brought rest to her weary soul and marked a watershed moment in her faith in Christ as she rested fully in His work on her behalf.
In 1840, she took a teaching position in Richmond, Virginia. Though she was an excellent teacher beloved by her students, the summer heat greatly affected her frail health. Letters written to friends during this time reveal ongoing struggles with (among other things) depression, headaches, angina, body pains, exhaustion, and strange neurological symptoms that no doctor could help her with.
At age twenty-seven, Elizabeth married the Rev. George Prentiss, pastor of South Trinitarian Church in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Elizabeth had always loved babies, and their first child, Annie, was born a year and a half later. Twenty-one months later, their second child, Edward, was born. Baby Eddy had health issues as well, and the sleep deprivation that Elizabeth experienced because of this left a permanent imprint on her health, creating relentless insomnia that she would suffer from for the rest of her life. Though Eddy’s health eventually improved, Elizabeth’s did not. She spent about three days a week in bed with a headache, and the other days she was filled with exhaustion and frailty. But her faith in God’s providence is clear when she writes:
It seems to me I can never recover my spirits and be as I have been in my best days, but what I lose in one way perhaps I shall gain in another. Just think how my ambition has been crushed at every point by my ill-health, and even the ambition to be useful and a comfort to those around me is trampled underfoot, to teach me what I could not have learned in any other school!3
The Prentiss family moved to New York, where George became the pastor of Mercer Street Presbyterian Church. When Elizabeth was six months pregnant with their third child, tragedy struck when Eddy died at the age of four. Elizabeth had not yet recovered when Bessie was born three months later.