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American Her Heart Can See: The Life and Hymns of Fanny J. Crosby. By Edith L. Blumhofer. [Library of Religious Biography] (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Company 2005. Pp. xxiv, 365. $20.00 paperback.)
This fine biography brings together Frances "Fanny" Jane Crosby (18201915), the blind Evangelical poet who created hundreds of lyrics immortalized in late nineteenth-century gospel hymns, and Edith L. Blumhofer, the distinguished historian of Pentecostalism and author of the acclaimed biography Aimee Semple McPherson: Everybody's Sister (Eerdmans, 1993). The encounter of a master Evangelical biographer with a nineteenth-century Evangelical hymnodic icon promises much, and Blumhofer does not disappoint. She delivers a deeply informed and carefully wrought interpretation of Crosby's life and works.This is unquestionably the best critical study of Crosby as well an accomplished interpretation of the Evangelical movement in postbellum New York City and the emergent gospel music industry.
Crosby is usually presented as a devoted spinsterly Methodist, a selective image she herself promoted in her 1906 autobiography, Memories of Eighty Years (1906). A century's worth of hagiographic commentary and outright legend has further distorted the historic Crosby, but Blumhofer uncovers an immense array of neglected facts and contexts to make new sense of her life experience. We learn, for example, that Crosby had...