No less than her martyred husband, she could be inspiring and frustrating all at once.
Elisabeth Elliot was one of the most extraordinary and controversial evangelicals of the post–World War II era. Anyone even marginally affiliated with the American missionary community knows the stirring and tragic story of Elisabeth and her first husband, Jim Elliot, who was killed in Ecuador by Waorani tribesmen in 1956.
Perhaps even more remarkably, Elisabeth Elliot and Rachel Saint (whose brother Nate also died in the attack) went to live among the Waorani in 1958. Before returning to the US, Elliot had become one of the best-known evangelicals in America, with coverage of Jim Elliot’s death and of her endurance on the mission field appearing in major national outlets like Life magazine.
Lucy S. R. Austen’s Elisabeth Elliot: A Life is a biography worthy of its subject, diving deep into Elliot’s vast body of correspondence and other writings to present an exceptionally detailed and sometimes conflicted portrait. About three-quarters of the book covers Elliot’s story up to 1963, when she returned to the US from South America. By that time, Elliot was a bestselling author whose now-classic books Through Gates of Splendor (1957) and Shadow of the Almighty: The Life and Testament of Jim Elliot (1958) were fast becoming standard reading among evangelicals.
Biographers of figures like Elliot always grapple with finding the right tone. Some Christian authors choose a hagiographical approach, presenting their subjects in a holy, inspirational light. In recent years, growing numbers of iconoclastic authors—especially academics—have gone to the other extreme, reviling once-revered evangelical figures and judging them irredeemable due to their complicity in various sins.
Austen happily inhabits …
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