Born in Philadelphia on February 7, 1832, Hannah Whitall grew up in a strict Quaker home and was educated in the Friends╒ School. She had from childhood a deep concern with religion and a habit of introspection, In June 1851 she married Robert P. Smith, also a Quaker. During the years of their residence in Germantown, Pennsylvania, she continued to brood on religion and, in her later recollections, passed through several stages of faith and understanding. In 1865 the family moved to Millville, New Jersey, where she and her husband came under the influence of the Wesleyan-based ╥holiness╙ movement, a revivalistic creed based on sanctification by faith and the direct experience of salvation. Robert Smith soon began preaching at holiness camp meetings, and in 1889 he began publishing in Philadelphia the periodical Christian╒s Pathway to Power, to which Hannah Smith contributed frequently. She began preaching as well.
In 1874 Smith traveled to England to join her husband, who had gone over a year before, and the two became the most prominent figures in the interdenominational ╥Higher Life╙ movement that swept up masses of followers in 1873╨1875. By eloquence and appearance Hannah Smith won the title of ╥angel of the churches╙ in her evangelistic addresses to huge gatherings throughout Britain. Their work there came to a sudden end in 1875 when Robert Smith was implicated in a scandal, and they returned to Philadelphia.
Hannah Smith then turned to writing. Her Record of a Happy Life; Being Memorials of Franklin Whitall Smith, a memoir of her late son, had appeared in 1873. In 1875 she published The Christian╒s Secret of a Happy Life, a guide to sanctification and complete surrender to divine will that was translated into several foreign languages and sold some 2 million copies around the world. Subsequent books included John M. Whitall: The Story of His Life, 1879, Every-day Religion; or, the Common-sense Teaching of the Bible, 1893, The Unselfishness of God and How I Discovered It: A Spiritual Autobiography, 1903, and Walking in the Sunshine, 1906, and she also wrote numerous pamphlets, tracts, and articles. She became a prominent advocate of providing opportunities for women to obtain college educations and in that regard was a strong influence on her niece, M. Carey Thomas. She helped found the Woman╒s Christian Temperance Union in 1874 and in 1883 became superintendent of its new Evangelistic Department.
In 1888 Smith and her husband moved to London, where their home was frequented by such persons as Bernard Berenson (who married their daughter Mary), Bertrand Russell (who married their daughter Alys), George Bernard Shaw, Henry and William James, Israel Zangwill, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and George Santayana. Hannah Smith continued to work with the British Women╒s Temperance Association, to preach occasionally, and to write. She died in Iffley, near Oxford, on May 1, 1911. Her son, Logan Pearsall Smith (1865╨1946), became a noted British essayist and critic. A collection of her essays was edited by Ray Strachey and published in 1928 as Religious Fanaticism: Extracts from the Papers of Hannah Whitall Smith.
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