https://www.amazon.com/Home-Holy-Land-Illustrating-Incidents-ebook/dp/B07NNR9HG9/?tag=2022091-20
1866
Elizabeth Anne Finn was born Elizabeth McCaul, on March 14, 1825. She was the daughter of Alexander McCaul, a Hebrew scholar and missionary, and Ms. Crosthwaite.
As a young child, she accompanied her father and the rest of the family on his religious missions around the world. The family finally settled in England when Elizabeth was just six years old.
Because young girls did not have access to the educational opportunities as boys did, Elizabeth was schooled at home. This luxury was not wasted on the young girl; she embraced the learning process, studying Hebrew, English, Greek, Latin, German, Yiddish, and some French and Italian. It was probably in these formative years that Elizabeth learned the value of cultures other than her own - an appreciation she would carry with her throughout her lifetime.
After marrying James Finn, at which time she adopted his last name, the two set out almost immediately for Jerusalem where James was to serve as British Consul, a position he remained in for the next seventeen years.
The life of a British official’s wife in the Mideast could have easily been a depressing one. Foreigners were not welcomed with open arms, especially female foreigners. Nonetheless, Finn dedicated herself to improving the conditions of the impoverished in and around Jerusalem.
Finn devoted her years in Jerusalem to charitable causes. Her good friend Caroline Cooper soon joined Finn, and together, they extended aid and services to the poor. Finn’s friendship and working relationship with Cooper had a lasting impact on her. At Finn’s urging, Cooper traveled to Jerusalem in 1848 to conduct charitable activities among the Jews; she ran a needlework school for Jewish women until her death in 1859.
Finn and her husband returned to England in 1863 where she began recording her memories of her experiences abroad. These observations were printed in a book form in 1866 in the narrative Home In the Holy Land: A Tale Illustrating Customs and Incidents in Modern Jerusalem. Part travel journal, part fiction, this work illustrated the depth of Finn’s knowledge of her foreign experience. She had clearly been more than just a tourist on an extended visit. Finn continued writing throughout the remainder of her life. She persevered in her focus on the landscape of her foreign travels. In her efforts to portray the vast differences between England and the Mideast, Finn eventually took up the practice of making Talbottypes, or prototypical photographs.
Finn’s last work is probably most telling of her life experiences. Reminiscences of Mrs. Finn, published eight years after her death in 1921, was based on Finn’s dictated accounts of her life abroad. The work includes childhood descriptions, educational experiences, her marriage and subsequent travels with her husband, and her first-hand observations of life as a foreigner in the Mideast.
Elizabeth Anne Finn devoted much of her life to the philanthropic causes of the Mideast. Elizabeth worked actively to improve the lives of the Jewish inhabitants, and she saw it as her duty to better their economic conditions by establishing a school in which they could be taught valuable skills and by organizing relief efforts during a famine.
Finn's experiences are relayed through her well-known fictional travel books and the collections of sketches she provided depicting foreign landscapes.
While her views were often marred by her own Christian faith, Finn nonetheless served as a voice for the English Christian missionaries who traveled to the Mideast in the nineteenth century.
Finn notes the history, trades, and languages of the Jewish Sephardim and Ashkenazim as well as those of the Greek and Latin Christian communities, and she comments frequently on Arab culture. She devotes much space to charitable and evangelical work that she and other English subjects conduct.
Finn was a member of the Royal Asiatic Society.
Quotes from others about the person
“During her residence in Jerusalem and upon her return to England, she wrote and published a fictional account of the experiences of English Christian missionaries to the Mideast derived from firsthand observations of Jerusalem’s culture, as well as an annotated collection of lithographs based on her sketches of the biblical landscape that she understood in depth. Although her views are marked by an air of cultural and religious superiority, they reveal an extensive and sympathetic knowledge of the languages, histories, and religious beliefs of Jerusalem’s Christians, Arabs, and Jews. Her life illustrates the dedication to a larger cause that was typical of many middle class Victorians.” - Laura Nilges-Matias
In 1846, Finn married James Finn, British Consul to Jerusalem.
