Frances Elizabeth Cox

Frances Elizabeth Cox (1812–1897) was an English Anglican translator whose work helped introduce German Protestant hymnody to nineteenth-century English-speaking congregations. Born in Oxford on May 10, 1812, she was the daughter of George Valentine Cox, an Oxford bookseller, publisher, and university figure. She spent most of her life in and around Oxford and developed a sustained interest in German religious poetry at a time when English hymnals were increasingly drawing on continental sources.

Cox received encouragement from Christian Karl Josias von Bunsen, the Prussian diplomat and scholar, whose extensive knowledge and collection of German hymns helped foster British interest in the tradition. Her first major collection, Sacred Hymns from the German, appeared in 1841. It presented German texts with English translations and biographical information about the writers, while attempting to retain the original meters so the translations could continue to function as hymns rather than merely as literary paraphrases.

A substantially revised and enlarged collection, Hymns from the German, was published in 1864. It contained fifty-six translations, combining revised material from the earlier volume with many new versions. Among her enduring translations are English forms of Christian Fürchtegott Gellert’s “Jesus Lives! No Longer Now,” Philipp Nicolai’s hymn commonly known as “Who Are These Like Stars Appearing?”, and Johann Jakob Schütz’s “Sei Lob und Ehr dem höchsten Gut.” Cox belonged to the nineteenth-century generation of translators who made Lutheran, Reformed, and Pietist hymn texts available to British and North American churches. She died in Oxford on September 28, 1897.