Elizabeth Scott

Elizabeth Scott was born at Hitchin. Her father, the Independent minister Thomas Scott (1679/80-1746), described her as a committed Christian poet. Her brothers, Joseph Nicoll (1702/03-69) and Thomas Scott (1705-75), also became Independent ministers, but she and Thomas were the primary hymn writers in the family. She married Elisha Williams, Independent minister in Norwich, in January 1752 (he had been Rector of Yale College in America, from 1726 to 1739), and left England with her new husband to sette in  Connecticut. Upon her husband’s death in 1755, Elizabeth remarried, this time to William Smith, whom she outlived. She died at Wethersfield, Connecticut, on June 13, 1776. She wrote prolifically before 1750, amassing three known manuscript collections of her hymns. Her work first received publication in 1763 in The Christian's Magazine. In 1769, more than a dozen of her hymns were included in A Collection of Hymns Adapted to Public Worship, compiled by the two Baptist ministers, John Ash of Pershore and Caleb Evans of Bristol. Twenty more were published posthumously in J. A. Dobell’s A New Selection of Nearly Eight Hundred Evangelical Hymns in 1806. A number of her hymns still remain among the manuscript collections at Yale.

For the text of a letter from Elizabeth to her father, dated 4 August 1738, click here.