Familiar Letters and Poems

Lucy Barns, daughter of a pioneer Universalist preacher, wrote letters and verse defending the faith from her sickbed and died at twenty-nine in 1809; her little book The Female Christian was the first published defense of Universalism by an American woman. This memorial edition, issued nearly a century later, preserved her writings for a denomination that had come to see her as its protomartyr of female authorship.

(Note: this summary was automatically generated and may be inaccurate.)