Adams, Sara Flower
b: February 22, 1805; Great Harlow, Essex
d: August 14, 1848; London
Highlights & Accomplishments
- daughter of Benjamin Flower, English radical journalist and political writer
- member of the Unitarian chapel at Finsbury, of which William Johnson fox is a minister. Later on, Fox “fathered” her when her biological father died in 1829
- close friends with the Victorian but precocious poet, Robert Browning
- together with her sister Eliza, they were featured in Harriet Martineau‘s most successful novel Deerbrook as the Ibbotson girls (1839)
- published a dramatic poem in four acts, Vivia Perpetua (1841), and a children’s book with cathecism and hymns, The Flock at the Fountain (1845)
- 13 of her hymns appeared in Hymns and Anthems (1841), but she is best known for Nearer My God to Thee (SDAH 473)
Family & Later Years
- aspired to be an actress but career was halted by ill health
- married William Bridges Adams in 1834, a civil engineer and inventor
- nursed her sister during the last stages of consumption (1846)
- died from either cancer or consumption (1848)
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