Background

Elizabeth Musser was born on February 4, 1960, in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. As a child, her favorite books were Nancy Drew mysteries, horse stories by Marguerite Henry and C. W. Anderson, and Walter Farley’s Black Stallion series.

Education

From the time Elizabeth Musser was six years old, she expressed herself best with words on paper. And she knew that she wanted to be a writer. In her early years, that passion for creativity came in the form of poems, short stories, and personalized birthday cards for family and friends. As a teenager, she was inspired by Mary Stewart’s mysteries, C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia and Catherine Marshall’s stories of faith and adventure.

The highest compliment she received in high school came from her English teacher who said that Musser has the ability to write well. Other teachers encourage her to write throughout her school years. In high school and college, she became a great lover of Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo.

She attended The Westminster Schools and then received her Bachelor of Arts degree in English and French from Vanderbilt University.

Career

After graduation, Elizabeth Musser spent eight months training for the mission field in Chicago, Illinois and then two years serving in a tiny Protestant church in Eastern France. She returned to France in 1989 to help a French pastor start a new church in the city of Montpellier, in the South of France. As a missionary, she wrote quarterly letters explaining her ministry to over 400 prayer partners back in the States. She determined to make these letters interesting, the best writing she could do. Then she returned to France. At a conference for their mission, she, eight months pregnant, waddled up to Jill Briscoe, a well-known author and speaker, and asked if she could talk to her about writing. The result of this talk was Jill Briscoe's assignment that Musser finishes an article she was working on, send it to her and she would publish it in her newsletter for ministry wives. So she became a published author and continued to write for Jill’s magazine for women in ministry, Just Between Us, as well as for her missions’ newsletters and magazines.

While in the United States during the summer of 1994, she attended a writer’s conference and met an editor who had at one time served as a missionary in France with her mission. Musser signed up for a 15-minute interview with him and presented her desire to write a women’s devotional book. He replied that his company was looking for a woman novelist. This editor explained to her the proper etiquette for presenting a book proposal to his publishing house and encouraged her to do so. She worked furiously on the project and a few months later sent him a sixty-page proposal-including a long synopsis, a chapter-by-chapter outline, a character sketch of the protagonists and a copy of the first three chapters of the book. He called her immediately after receiving the proposal and said he’d be presenting her proposal to a committee in two weeks. In the end, they offered Elizabeth Musser a contract.

Two years later, in 1996 he published her first book Two Crosses. Her second book, Two Testaments, was published nex year. Her third and final novel in the trilogy, Two Destinies, remained unpublished in the United States for 13 years. Then in 2012, finally, the whole trilogy was published. The Secrets of the Cross Trilogy takes place during the Algerian War for Independence from France (1957-1962). Musser chose this setting, knowing that most Americans were completely unfamiliar with that war. Yet daily, the paper was filled with news of Algeria because of the civil war that was at that time going on in that country. She felt Algeria and France would provide a unique, new setting for a novel. Living in the south of France, she also met many people who had lived through the war, either as French citizens, military or Algerians. She had many interviews with people and visited all the sites in France which would be included in this trilogy. She also decided to weave a bit of the French Protestant history into this series, thus choosing the Huguenot cross as the main symbol.

The author's fourth novel, The Swan House (2001), takes place in her native Atlanta. As with her other novels, she combines recent history with fiction to create the compelling story of sixteen-year-old Mary Swan Middleton and her search for truth. Her inspiration for this novel came from her upbringing in an affluent neighborhood and the struggles she had as she tried to understand her faith in Christ within the context of wealth. The Dwelling Place (2005) is the story of a daughter’s struggle to reconcile with her mother and find her place in a family. Many characters from The Swan House reappear in this novel, which, although set in present-day Atlanta, nonetheless takes the reader back into the world of the turbulent 60s and specifically the events of 1968 in both America and France. The novel examines the themes of brokenness and healing, faith and forgiveness, surrender and sacrifice and gives an honest view of what the evangelical world looks like from the outside.

In the past years, she wrote Searching for Eternity (2007), Words Unspoken (2009), The Sweetest Thing (2011), The Long Highway Home, The Wren’s Nest. Her most recent novel When I Close My Eyes (2019), set against the flaming hills of North Carolina and the peaceful shores of the Mediterranean Sea, tells the story of two families struggling with dysfunction and finding that love is stronger than death.

Achievements

• Elizabeth Musser's novel The Swan House was named one of Amazon’s Top Christian Books of the Year and one of Georgia’s Top Ten Novels of the Past 100 Years. Two Destinies was a finalist for the 2013 Christy Award. The Long Highway Home has been an international bestseller. All of her novels have been translated into multiple languages.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Sweetest Thing

    (The Singleton family's fortunes seem unaffected by the Gr...)

    2011
  • Words Unspoken

    (Lissa Randall's future was bright with academic promise u...)

    2009
  • Searching for Eternity

    (French-born Emile de Bonnery lands in the strange environ...)

    2007
  • Dwelling Place

    (In a family of successes, she's the embarrassment, still ...)

    2005
  • The Swan House

    (Mary Swan Middleton has always taken for granted the adva...)

    2001
  • Love Beyond Limits: A Southern Love Story

    (Emily has a secret: she's in love with one of the freedme...)

    2015
  • When I Close My Eyes

    (There is one story that novelist Josephine Bourdillon shi...)

    2019
  • The Long Highway Home

    (Sometimes going home means leaving everything you have ev...)

    2016
  • Waiting for Peter

    (The day is almost boiling hot. I lay on the hot pavement ...)

    2015

• books

  • Secrets of the Cross Trilogy

    (Secrets of the Cross Trilogy consists of three books Two...)

Views

Quotations: "Many times as I am in the process of writing a novel, I find my characters doing things that surprise me - as I delve into their personalities. However, I’m careful that they remain true to themselves - so sometimes those surprising actions get edited out. As an author, I need to know a lot more about my characters than I can show in the novel - for instance, their background, their likes and dislikes, their fears, their secrets. Many of these things come out during the course of the novel, but not all. Still, I need to know so that it all holds together."

"Living in another culture is a great way to be humbled, again and again, and it seems that this is so often God’s way - He humbles us before He uses us."

"Always a choice, even in not choosing."

"When you love, it will hurt. You have to choose to forgive, again and again. But it’s worth it. That’s the crux of human relationships. The sweetest thing. Loving deeply. And forgiving."

"Our part is to get to know God, as a Father and a friend. But to understand Him? His ways are far past our understanding. Infinitely far."

"God does not waste our suffering. It always serves a purpose."

Connections

Elizabeth Musser's husband's name is Paul. They have two sons, a daughter-in-law and three grandchildren.

husband:

Paul Musser