Susannah Harrison (1752–1784) (also known as Susanna Harrison), was an English working-class religious poet. Her 1780 collection ''Songs in the Night'' went through at least twenty-one editions in Britain and America,
making it "one of the best selling collections written by a laboring-class poet in the late eighteenth century".
[Bridget Keenan, 'Mysticims and Mystifications: The Demands of Laboring-Class Religious Poetry', ''Criticism'', Vol. 47, No. 4 (Fall 2005), pp.471-91]
Harrison was a domestic servant who taught herself to read and write. Aged twenty, she suffered an illness from which she did not expect to survive and gave manuscripts of her poetry to
John Conder
John Conder D.D. (3 June 1714 – 30 May 1781) was an Independent minister at Cambridge who later became President of the Independent College, Homerton in the parish of Hackney (parish), Hackney near London. John Conder was the theological tuto ...
, a
Congregationalist Minister, who edited and published her poems for her.
She died 3 August 1784 in
Ipswich
Ipswich () is a port town and Borough status in the United Kingdom, borough in Suffolk, England. It is the county town, and largest in Suffolk, followed by Lowestoft and Bury St Edmunds, and the third-largest population centre in East Anglia, ...
.
Works
* ''Songs in the Night'', 1780
See also
*
List of 18th-century British working-class writers
This list focuses on published authors whose working-class status or background was part of their literary reputation. These were, in the main, writers without access to formal education, so they were either autodidacts or had mentors or patro ...
References
External links
Susannah Harrisonat
hymnary.org
Hymnary.org is an online database of hymns, hymnodists and hymnals hosted by Calvin University's Calvin Institute of Christian Worship and Christian Classics Ethereal Library. The searchable database contains over one million hymn tunes and texts ...
1752 births
1784 deaths
18th-century English poets
Calvinist and Reformed poets
Christian poets
Christian hymnwriters
English hymnwriters
English women poets
18th-century English women writers
British women hymnwriters
18th-century English people
{{England-poet-stub