The title of Mary Anne Hearn's 1907 autobiography--A Working Woman's Life--precisely describes Hearn's life and alludes to one of her lifelong themes, the importance of work. Never married, Hearn devoted her life to writing more than forty books and tracts, hundreds of articles in Christian publications, lecturing to large audiences, teaching, and serving her community. Her life of independence, usefulness, and unending work exemplified the kind of life her poems and sketches advocated for the hundreds of thousands of readers she reached over her fifty-two years as a writer for The Christian World and twenty-four years as an editor of The Sunday School Times.

Hearn deserves attention as one of the most prolific religious writers of the second half of the nineteenth century, though her poems, sketches, and biographies have little literary merit to modern readers. On the other hand, as her work appealed mainly to the...