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Cecil B. Hartley. The
Three Mrs. Judsons, the Celebrated Female Missionaries (1860),
frontispiece; portrait also stamped in gold on spine.
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EMILY
C. JUDSON (1817 – 1854)
The daughter of a struggling farmer and businessman, Emily
Judson earned money as a child by helping her mother run a boarding house and
working in the New York
woolen mills, receiving an informal and frequently interrupted education.
Impressed by her desire to learn, the preceptresses at the Utica Female
Seminary invited her to study for a year in their school free of cost, after
which they hired her as a teacher. While in Utica, she began to publish children's
books, earning enough in royalties to house and support her destitute
parents. She also contributed her immensely popular sketches of village life
to periodicals under the pseudonym "Fanny Forester," and much of
her magazine work later appeared in the collections Trippings in Author-Land
and Alderbrook, the latter
of which went through many editions.
In 1845 she
met the Rev. Adoniram Judson, the founder of the American Baptist mission in Burma
and a hero of Emily Judson's childhood, and despite the disapproval of both
the Reverend's and the writer's respective circles, they wed in 1846, setting
sail for Burma soon thereafter. In Burma, Emily Judson cared for her
young stepsons and bore children of her own while learning the local language
and proselytizing to the Burmese. After the deaths of her husband and
youngest son in 1850, she made the nine-month return trip to New England with her remaining children in 1851.
Back in the
U.S., Emily Judson
published collections of essays and poetry and assisted a professor at Brown University in preparing a biography of
her husband. The rapid onset of consumptive illness stalled her writing, and
she died in Hamilton, N.Y., at age thirty-six.
Other portraits
appear in:
Rufus S.
Griswold. “The Heroism of the Knights Errant and the Female
Missionaries of America,” in Godey’s
Lady’s Book 37 (1848): 61-68, frontispiece containing five
separate portraits.
William
Hunt, ed. The American Biographical
Sketch Book (1848), plate opposite p. 202.
John S.
Hart, ed. Female Prose Writers of
America (1852), plate opposite p. 283.
Sarah J.
Hale, ed. Woman’s Record
(1853), p. 710; also 1855 ed.
Abner D.
Jones, ed. The Illustrated American
Biography, vol. 1 (1853), p. 177 or p. 339 (two variant issues).
Arabella
M.S. Willson. The Lives of Mrs. Ann H.
Judson and Mrs. Sarah B. Judson, with a Biographical Sketch of Mrs. Emily C.
Judson, Missionaries to Burmah (1853), frontispiece.
The Ladies’ Repository (April, 1857),
plate preceding p. 193.
Henry Coppée, ed. A Gallery of Distinguished English and American
Female Poets (1860), p. 290.
A.C. Kendrick. The Life and Letters of Mrs. Emily C. Judson (1860), frontispiece.
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