Anne Steele

Anne Steele (1717–1778) was an English Baptist hymn-writer who spent her whole life at Broughton in Hampshire, where her father was a Dissenting minister and pastor of the congregation. Her health was never firm, and she wrote chiefly for her family and friends; it was only with reluctance that she allowed any of it to be published, under the name “Theodosia”. Her Poems on Subjects Chiefly Devotional appeared in two volumes in 1760, and a third volume of Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose and Verse was published after her death, in 1780, by the Rev. Caleb Evans of Bristol. Her hymns, among them “Father of mercies, in thy word”, made her the first major woman hymn-writer in English.

The texts given here follow the Boston edition of 1808 (volume I: the hymns and the occasional poems), with the Psalm versions and the posthumous miscellaneous poems taken from the Bristol edition of 1780. The prose meditations and essays of those volumes are not included.