Background
Thoburn was born in 1840 at St. Clairsville, Ohio. She was the daughter of Matthew and Jane Lyle (Crawford) Thoburn, and a sister of James M. Thoburn.
Thoburn was born in 1840 at St. Clairsville, Ohio. She was the daughter of Matthew and Jane Lyle (Crawford) Thoburn, and a sister of James M. Thoburn.
She attended the public schools, and in her fifteenth year entered the Female Seminary of Wheeling, Va. (now W. Va. ). After a period of teaching she returned to the Wheeling institution, now become a college, for further study, and subsequently spent a year in the Cincinnati Academy of Design.
During the Civil War she gave herself freely to organizing relief groups and sewing circles, collecting supplies, feeding passing troops, and nursing the wounded in the hospitals.
Teaching in Wheeling, W. Va. , Newcastle, Pa. , and West Farmington, Ohio, prepared her further for what was to be her life career. In 1869 her brother James, then in India, convinced that because of their home responsibilities the wives of missionaries could not be depended upon to meet the demands of women's work, wrote a letter to his sister which he closed with these words: "The women of India need you. How would you like to come and take charge of a school, if we decide to make the attempt?" By return steamer Isabella replied that she would "come just as soon as a way was opened". That same year the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church was founded in Boston, Massachussets, and under its auspices, on November 3, accompanied by Dr. Clara A. Swain, she sailed for India, arriving in Bombay on January 7, 1870.
The city of Lucknow in Oudh became the center of her activities. Into the education of the girls and young women of India she threw herself with zeal and courage. On April 18, in Aminabad bazaar, she began a school with six girls and herself the only teacher, while a Christian youth guarded the group with a stout bamboo. From a day school it developed into a boarding school, then into a high school, and finally into a college for women – now the Isabella Thoburn College, the women's college of Lucknow University. Buying the beautiful estate of the Ruby Garden (Lal Bagh) with its seven acres from a Mohammedan nobleman of the old kingdom of Oudh, she erected her buildings. The college that came into being was for Indian and Eurasian, Hindu, Mohammedan, and Christian alike; no religious or racial prejudice was to mar its peace and fellowship.
She was in America in 1880-81, and again from 1886 to 1891. During this latter period she was closely associated with the new Deaconess movement in the Methodist Episcopal Church, and herself became a graduate deaconess. She assisted Lucy Rider Meyer in the Chicago Training School, and was the founder in Cincinnati, Ohio, of the Elizabeth Gamble Deaconess Home and Training School, and of the Christ Hospital. Returning to India, she continued her educational activities. In 1899 she came back to the United States, accompanied by Lilavati Singh, one of her graduates and teachers, seeking funds. The two Christian women made a deep impression upon the Ecumenical Conference held in New York in 1900. That same year she returned to India and on September 1, 1901, died of Asiatic cholera in Lucknow.
She also founded the Girls' High School in Cawnpore (1874), and helped in establishing the Wellesley School for girls in Naini Tal (1891). For years she edited the Rafiq-i-Niswan (The Woman's Friend), a paper that went into non-Christian zenanas and Christian homes. She also wrote and published in 1899 a life of Phoebe Rowe, one of her teachers and friends.