And now I wonder if you have guessed, or if you knew all the while that this remarkable woman was the author of some of your favorite books!
The Susy books! ah! your mothers will tell you that these books were their favorites as well as your own! Susy’s Six Birthdays was published thirty-three years ago, then followed the others of the series, and Flower of the Family, and Peterchen and Gretchen, and Tangle Thread, Silver Thread and Golden Thread, besides many others, up to twenty-five volumes. The book which has been more widely read than any other of her works is probably “Stepping Heavenward.”
More than seventy thousand copies have been sold in this country, and the work has also been translated into the French and German languages.
Mrs. Prentiss’ books were all written after her marriage to Rev. George L. Prentiss, which occurred in 1845. Mr. Prentiss was the pastor of a church in New Bedford. Afterwards they lived in New York and, in the year 1866, they went to a quiet place among the Green Mountains to spend the summer, and so delighted were they with the beauties of Dorset that they made it their summer home, building a cottage there in which Mrs. Prentiss died about twelve years later.
It is impossible to give you any account of the varied scenes of her life in such a brief sketch. She was called to pass through many sorrows. The death of the father to which I have already referred; later the loss of her mother, sister, brother and children.
These bereavements came one after another, yet her Christian character only shone out the brighter.
“Though the death of her children tore with anguish the mother’s heart, she made no show of grief, and to the eye of the world her life soon appeared to move on as aforetime. Never again, however, was it exactly the same life. She had entered into the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings and the new experience wrought a great change in her whole being.” She was remarkably happy in the children spared to her, and in all her home life. A friend has written of her:
“I have ever regarded her as favored among women, blessed in doing her Master’s will and in testifying of Him, blessed in her home, in her friends, in her work and blessed in her death.”
Faye Huntington.
