LOUISA LOWRIE (1809 - 1833)

Louisa Lowrie joined the Presbyterian Church after the death of her father in 1826, her mother having died many years earlier. In March, 1833, she married the Rev. John C. Lowrie, a graduate of the Princeton Theological Seminary who was ordained and sent to India by the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church the following May. During their trip to India, Mrs. Lowrie became very ill and died less than a month after they arrived.

Although her work had barely begun when she died, Lowrie’s memoir was compiled a few years later and sold to support foreign missions. In its introduction, Elisha P. Swift, corresponding secretary of the Western Foreign Mission Society, justifies a publication on so short a life, possibly to encourage others to become missionaries in spite of the risk of early death:

“We hope and trust that this little volume, like the Memoirs of Mrs. Newell, Mrs. Judson, Mrs. Winslow, and others, will be made to exert an honored instrumentality in promoting the genuine spirit of missions, and more especially among the female members of the Redeemer’s family in our land.…As one of the pioneers in this self-denied service, is it too much to hope that the amiable and devoted subject of this Memoir, may like her sainted sisters already mentioned, contribute more by her early death than by a long and active life, thus to widen and extend the kingdom of her Savior?” (p. xiii)

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