Fanny Crosby (Frances Jane Van Alstyne): Hymn-writer; born at South East, New York, [United States], March 24, 1820. She became totally blind in infancy, and was educated at the New York Institute for the Blind, where she taught English grammar and rhetoric, as well as Greek, Roman, and American history, 1847-58, when she married Alexander Van Alstyne, a blind man. She has written more than three thousand hymns, among the best known being "Safe in the Arms of Jesus;" Jesus Keep Me Near the Cross;" "Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior;" "Rescue the Perishing;" and "Sweet Hour of Prayer."

She has also written The Blind Girl and other Poems (New York, 1844); Monterey and other Poems (1849); A Wreath of Columbia's Flowers (1859); Bells at Evening and other Poems, with biographical sketch by Robert Lowry, 1898 (5th ed, 1903); and Memories of Eighty Years (1907).

[Fanny Crosby died in 1915.]

From The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge... New York: Funk and Wagnalls Company, 1909.

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