Frances Jane Crosby

Frances Jane Crosby, universally known in print as Fanny J. Crosby and also published under her married name Frances Van Alstyne, was an American poet, hymn writer, educator, and urban mission worker. Born in Putnam County, New York, in 1820 and blind from infancy, she entered the New York Institution for the Blind in 1835 and later taught there from 1847 until 1858. She married Alexander Van Alstyne, a fellow blind musician and former student of the institution, in 1858.

Crosby became an extraordinarily prolific writer of gospel-song texts, producing more than eight thousand hymns under her own name and numerous pseudonyms. Her works include Blessed Assurance, Rescue the Perishing, Safe in the Arms of Jesus, To God Be the Glory, and I Am Thine, O Lord. Later in life she was deeply involved in New York City rescue missions and belonged to the Methodist Episcopal Church while maintaining broad evangelical relationships.

Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior belongs to the beginning of her long collaboration with William Howard Doane. Crosby’s autobiographies state that Doane gave her the subject and that she wrote the hymn in 1868. A later prison-service story became popular in the twentieth century, but it does not appear in Crosby’s autobiographical accounts and cannot currently be verified from contemporary evidence.