Emily Bowes

Emily Bowes Gosse (London, 1806 – Islington, 1857) was a prolific writer of religious tracts, poems and articles on evangelical Christianity. For a time she was wrongly credited as a Victorian landscape painter and illustrator, but the sources do not support her being a painter, and her importance lies in devotional literature. Born in London to a family from old New England lines, she worked as a governess from 1824 in homes in Berkshire and Hove before returning to the capital. At the Plymouth Brethren assembly in Hackney she met Philip Henry Gosse, whom she married in 1848; their only child, Edmund, was born in 1849. Before the marriage she had published two series of Hymns and Sacred Poems, and afterwards she wrote many gospel tracts, at least sixty-three of them, with some seven million copies sold by 1866. Her book Abraham and His Children (1855) was favourably reviewed. She was the most prolific female Victorian Brethren writer, second only in output to the hymn-writer Frances Bevan. In 1856 she found a lump in her breast; after a recommendation for immediate excision, the couple pursued an alternative treatment that caused her considerable pain, and she died in Islington in February 1857.