Her Books, and Where to Start

Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path. PSALM 119:105

Elisabeth Elliot wrote more than twenty books over nearly fifty years, as well as a newsletter, many articles and years of radio broadcasts. All her books remain in copyright, and none of them is reproduced here; obtain them from their rightful publishers, from libraries, or second-hand. Several have been reissued under new titles or in new editions, so a reader may find a book under a slightly different name from the one given below. What follows is a short guide, arranged for usefulness rather than completeness, with a suggested order of reading. At the end is a second guide, to the older writers she loved, several of whom are in the Ochorus library.

Begin here

Through Gates of Splendor (1957). The story of the five men who died on the Curaray River in January 1956, told within months of their deaths by the widow of one of them. It is the book through which most people first met her. Read an edition that includes the epilogue she added in 1996, and read it with chapter thirteen of this companion in mind.

Keep a Quiet Heart (1995). Short readings drawn from her newsletter, a page or two at a time, full of her ordinary wisdom. The best introduction to her teaching voice, and the book behind chapters four and fifteen.

Passion and Purity (1984). The story of her long courtship with Jim Elliot, told as a book of counsel on bringing love under the lordship of Christ. Widely read by young people, and the book behind chapter nine.

The missionary years

Shadow of the Almighty (1958). The life of Jim Elliot, drawn largely from his journals and letters. Read it after Through Gates of Splendor, to see the young man behind the story.

The Savage My Kinsman (1961). A photographic account of her time living among the Waorani with her small daughter, with her own text.

These Strange Ashes (1975). Her first year in Ecuador, among the Colorado people, and the losses that taught her that God owes no explanations. Short and searching.

No Graven Image (1966). Her only novel, about a young missionary linguist whose work ends in apparent failure. Unsettling, and meant to be. See chapter thirteen.

The Christian life

The Liberty of Obedience (1968). A short early book on obedience as the way to freedom; see chapter seven.

Discipline: The Glad Surrender (1982). On bringing body, mind, place, time, possessions, work and feelings under God’s rule. Practical and bracing; see chapter eight.

A Path Through Suffering (1990). Her fullest book on suffering, drawing on Scripture, on her own losses and on the nature parables of Lilias Trotter; see chapters five and six.

On Asking God Why (1989). Short essays on faith and its questions; see chapter sixteen.

Loneliness (1988), later reissued as The Path of Loneliness. On singleness, widowhood and every kind of solitude as a wilderness where God meets His people; see chapter ten.

Quest for Love (1996). A companion to Passion and Purity, gathering, with her counsel, the stories of others who sought to keep their love under Christ’s rule.

Womanhood, manhood and the home

Let Me Be a Woman (1976). Brief chapters written for her daughter before her marriage, on singleness, marriage and womanhood. Read it with chapter eleven in mind, and with your Bible open.

The Mark of a Man (1981). The companion book, adapted from letters to her nephew Pete, on Christian manhood.

The Shaping of a Christian Family (1992). Her memories of the home she grew up in, and a book of counsel for families; see chapter twelve.

Devotional collections

Secure in the Everlasting Arms (2002). Short pieces on trust in God amid change and loss, taking their title from the promise with which her radio programme began.

Be Still My Soul (2003). A collection of short devotional readings, which takes its title from the old hymn.

A life she wrote

A Chance to Die: The Life and Legacy of Amy Carmichael (1987). Her biography of the missionary who shaped her more than any other, and one of her finest books; see chapter fourteen.

About her

Her daughter, Valerie Elliot Shepard, has published her parents’ letters from the years of their courtship and marriage in Devotedly (2019). Ellen Vaughn’s two-volume authorised biography, Becoming Elisabeth Elliot (2020) and Being Elisabeth Elliot (2023), is the fullest account of her life. In the Ochorus library, Portraits of Courage – Elisabeth Elliot tells her life at length, and Jim Elliot has his own author page.

A suggested order

For a first year with her: Through Gates of Splendor; Keep a Quiet Heart; Passion and Purity, if you are young or unmarried, or Let Me Be a Woman or The Mark of a Man, if you are about to marry; Discipline: The Glad Surrender; A Path Through Suffering; and A Chance to Die. Then, as the need arises, Loneliness, On Asking God Why, These Strange Ashes or No Graven Image.

Others she loved, in the Ochorus library

She would not want her readers to stop at her. Here are some of the writers who shaped her, and where they can be found.

Amy Carmichael (1867–1951). Her spiritual mother in all but name, and the subject of A Chance to Die. Two of Amy Carmichael’s books are in the Ochorus library: Things as They Are, her honest early account of missionary work in South India, and If, the little book of searching sentences on Calvary love described in chapter fourteen.

David Brainerd (1718–1747). The young missionary to the Native Americans of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, whose journal was edited by Jonathan Edwards and has stirred generations of missionaries. Jim Elliot read Brainerd closely and took him as a model. The Life and Diary of David Brainerd is in the Ochorus library.

Thomas à Kempis. The Imitation of Christ, the fifteenth-century classic of self-denial and devotion, belongs to the old tradition of the death of self and the quiet heart in which her own teaching stands. It is in the Ochorus library.

Hudson Taylor (1832–1905). The founder of the China Inland Mission, whose life of faith and obedience was part of the missionary inheritance in which she was raised. His A Retrospect is in the Ochorus library, with Ochorus’s companion The Key Teachings of Hudson Taylor.

Brother Lawrence. The Practice of the Presence of God, the little book of a seventeenth-century lay brother who found God as near in the kitchen as at prayer, belongs naturally beside her teaching on doing the next thing. It is in the Ochorus library.

Three counsels for reading her

Read her with the Bible open. She claimed no authority but Scripture, and she argued constantly from it. Where she is plainly scriptural, receive it. Where faithful Christians differ, as on the roles of men and women, weigh her under the Word.

Read her slowly. Her sentences are plain and short, and it is easy to hurry through them. Many of her books are collections of brief readings, and they are best taken one at a time.

And read her to obey. She wrote to get people to do something — to accept, to obey, to offer, to do the next thing. One chapter obeyed will do more than the whole shelf admired.

The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms. DEUTERONOMY 33:27