Author: Williams, Sarah Johanna
Biography:
WILLIAMS, Sarah Johanna (1805-1841: Edlin-White)
She was born on 5 July 1805 at Halifax, the second child of the Rev. John Williams (1768-1835), dissenting minister at North-End Chapel, and his wife Bridget Aldred (1777-1840). Her mother was the daughter of the Rev. Ebenezer Aldred, Presbyterian minister at Great Hucklow, Derbyshire. In 1811 her father was appointed minister at the Old Meeting House, Mansfield, a post he held until his death. He also ran an Academy. In 1831 Williams won a competition of the Nottingham Literary Society for her poem, printed later as Sherwood Forest (1832). She also contributed poems to The Wreath, or Nottingham Literary Miscellany (1832) and hymns to Mary Ann Jevons’s Sacred Offering, a Poetical Annual (1830-1838). Outside the Midlands, her reputation rested on her hymns, two of which survived in The New Hymnal (1805). She died, aged 35, of pneumonia, at West Hill, Chesterfield Road, Mansfield, 19 May 1841. (ancestry.co.uk 5 Aug. 2020; Nottingham Review 4 and 11 Dec. 1835, 27 Mar. 1840, 28 May 1841; Derbyshire Courier 22 May 1841; Unitarian Magazine Aug. 1841, 529; Spencer T. Hall, Biographical Sketches [1873], 82; Rowena Edlin-White, Sarah Johanna Williams [2014]) AA