Appendix D: Notes on Sources and Method

“Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.”

— 1 Thessalonians 5:21, KJV

About This Work

This book is an independent biography written by Ochorus. It is not published by, affiliated with, or endorsed by the family or estate of Elisabeth Elliot, or by any publisher, foundation, broadcaster or other organisation that holds rights in her writings and recordings. Her books, letters, newsletters and broadcasts remain in copyright, and they should be obtained from their publishers or borrowed from a library. Readers are warmly encouraged to do so. Nothing in this book can replace the clarity and directness of her own voice.

The book tells her life in its own words. It does not quote Elisabeth Elliot anywhere. Everything it reports of what she thought, felt, wrote or taught is paraphrased, no letter, journal entry, newsletter or broadcast of hers is reproduced, and her books are described rather than retold. The only words quoted, apart from Scripture, are these:

Jim Elliot’s journal, 28 October 1949. His sentence about the man who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose, quoted once, in the chapter “Palm Beach”.

“Doe the Nexte Thynge”. The anonymous nineteenth-century poem she often cited, which is in the public domain: its refrain, in the chapters “The Widow at Shandia” and “The Next Thing”, and its opening line, in “The Next Thing”.

Amy Carmichael. Two brief phrases from her public-domain writing: the refrain of If, in the chapter “Hampden DuBose”, and a phrase from the poem that gave These Strange Ashes its title, in “Macario, and a Stolen Suitcase”.

Scripture. All Scripture is quoted from the King James Version.

Primary Sources

Elisabeth Elliot’s own books are the first source for her life, and the most important are named in the chapters where they belong. Through Gates of Splendor (1957; new edition with an epilogue, 1996) tells the story of the five missionaries. Shadow of the Almighty (1958) is her life of Jim Elliot, built around his journals and letters, and she later edited The Journals of Jim Elliot (1978). The Savage My Kinsman (1961) records, chiefly in photographs, her time among the Waorani. These Strange Ashes (1975) describes her first year in Ecuador among the Colorados. Passion and Purity (1984) tells the story of her courtship with Jim, and The Shaping of a Christian Family (1992) describes the home in which she grew up. Her novel No Graven Image (1966) is not autobiography, but it draws closely on her own experience.

Valerie Elliot Shepard’s Devotedly: The Personal Letters and Love Story of Jim and Elisabeth Elliot (2019) publishes a large selection of her parents’ letters and journals from the years of their courtship and marriage.

Biographies and Studies

This book is particularly indebted to the following, which readers who want to go further will find rewarding:

Ellen Vaughn, Becoming Elisabeth Elliot (2020) and Being Elisabeth Elliot (2023). The authorised biography, written with access to her surviving journals and letters. The second volume is the fullest published account of her later years, including her marriages to Addison Leitch and Lars Gren.

Lucy S. R. Austen, Elisabeth Elliot: A Life (2023). An independent full-length biography based on long study of the sources.

Kathryn T. Long, God in the Rainforest: A Tale of Martyrdom and Redemption in Amazonian Ecuador (2019). A historian’s account of the missionary encounter with the Waorani from the 1950s onward, giving full weight to the Waorani themselves and to the tensions among the missionaries.

Russell T. Hitt, Jungle Pilot (1959). The life of Nate Saint, drawing on his letters and diaries.

Olive Fleming Liefeld, Unfolding Destinies. The story of Pete Fleming and of the years after 1956, told by his widow.

Corrections and Disputed Points

The Waorani. The people who killed the five missionaries were widely called “Auca” in the 1950s, a Quichua word meaning roughly “savage”, which they regarded as an insult. This book uses their own name, Waorani, except where the older label is part of a historical title such as Operation Auca.

The 1956 story. The early accounts, including Elisabeth Elliot’s own, were written within months of the deaths and inevitably simplified a complicated history. Her 1996 epilogue, and the work of Long and others, have qualified them. Where later research differs from the first telling, this book follows the later research.

Addison Leitch. Most sources give 17 September 1973 as the date of his death, a few the 18th, and they differ on exactly when and where he and Elisabeth first met. The account given here keeps to what the sources agree on.

Lars Gren. Our knowledge of Elisabeth Elliot’s third marriage rests largely on Ellen Vaughn’s Being Elisabeth Elliot, which draws on the testimony of family and friends gathered after her death, because, as Vaughn reports, most of her journals from those years were destroyed. Lars Gren, who died in 2025, did not give his own account, and his view of the marriage is largely missing from the record. This book reports only what that published biography describes, attributes it to Vaughn, and records equally his many years of care for Elisabeth in her illness, without attempting to judge between them.

Her teaching on women. Her views on men, women, marriage and submission were embraced by many readers and criticised by others, including evangelicals who hold that Scripture teaches the equality of men and women in the home and the church. This book describes the debate but does not try to settle it; the teaching itself is weighed in the companion volume, The Key Teachings of Elisabeth Elliot.

Quotations attributed to her. Many sayings circulate under her name, and not all of them are hers. Readers who wish to quote her should check the words against her own books.

The Library She Loved

Several of the books that shaped Elisabeth and Jim Elliot are in the public domain and in the Ochorus library. Amy Carmichael’s Things as They Are and If come from the missionary whose life Elisabeth later wrote. The Life and Diary of David Brainerd was a model for Jim Elliot’s own devotion and for his journal. Hudson Taylor’s A Retrospect tells the story of a missionary who learned, as she did, to trust God for the next step. Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ and Brother Lawrence’s The Practice of the Presence of God belong to the tradition of practical, daily devotion she commended. Jim Elliot also has an author page on Ochorus. All of these can be read freely there, alongside the companion volume The Key Teachings of Elisabeth Elliot.

Scripture

All Scripture quotations are from the Authorised (King James) Version, which is in the public domain.