Gathering, selecting, and editing hymns was not a typical project for women in the nineteenth century. That did not stop Emma, a visionary woman in her own sense of the word.1 She had been promised in her 1830 revelation: “Thy time shall be given to writing, and to learning much.”2 She probably gathered hymns from her hometown newspaper as well as other papers and denominational hymnals.3 The process, like so many other endeavors in her life, would ebb and flow with loss and compensation, requiring more than five years to produce.
