Elizabeth Cecilia Clephane left a mere eight hymns to posterity; but these are among the finest examples of evangelical hymnody, one of the dominant types of devotional writing of her time. During the explosion of hymn writing in the nineteenth century, such religious verse--many of which were written by women--was published in newspapers and religious magazines and eventually made its way into one or more of the hundreds of nineteenth-century hymnbooks. Clephane's hymns are vital cultural material because they were part of the communal religious lives of thousands of people, both British and American. Hymns provided literary experiences for many Victorians, whether or not they read what is conventionally treated as canonical poetry.

Clephane probably lived to see only one of her hymns in print. However, that hymn caught the attention of the American evangelist Ira D. Sankey, who, along with Dwight Moody, captivated thousands of working-class and...