Sarah Prince

Sarah Prince Gill (1728-1761) was an American Christian prayer group leader and writer.

The daughter of Thomas and Deborah Prince, Sarah was born in 1728. Her father, Thomas Prince, was the pastor of Boston's Old South Meeting House during the Great Awakening. She never published during her lifetime, but her Meditations were saved in the Boston Public Library and published recently in a volume with meditations of Sarah Edwards, edited by Dorothy Baker.^[1] She was also a correspondent of Esther Edwards Burr whose journal was published in 1984 edited by Laurie Crumpacker and Carol Karlsen. The two women started prayer groups and met regularly to monitor their own religious experience. Prince and Burr kept their rich, lengthy exchange of letters hidden from their families.^[2] They were best friends and called each other "sisters of the heart." Prince deeply mourned Burr's death in 1758; as she wrote in her diary, "My whole prospects in this world are now changed. . . O the tenderness which tied our hearts! O the comfort I have enjoyed in her." Their close relationship stands out in an era when male commenters doubted women had the capacity for true friendship.^[3] Their prayer groups may have been models for the women's groups of the nineteenth century. Prince married Moses Gill in 1758 and they inherited the Prince estate in Princeton, Massachusetts. They had no children. Prince died in 1761.

References

1. McCulley, Sue Lane; Baker, Dorothy Zayatz (2005). The silent and soft communion : the spiritual narratives of Sarah Pierpont Edwards and Sarah Prince Gill. University of Tennessee Press. ISBN 9781572334373.
2. Joan Shelley Rubin and Scott E. Casper, eds. Oxford Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History, (NY: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 356.
3. The History Project, Improper Bostonians (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), p. 27.