Divine Songs and Meditacions (1653)

Among the rarest surviving voices of 17th-century English women writers, An Collins offers a collection that aches with authenticity. Written during the upheavals of the English Civil War, these poems and meditations emerge from a life marked by chronic illness and spiritual desolation. Collins does not offer polished theology but something rawer: the jagged terrain of a soul grappling with faith while the body fails. Her verses move between anguish and solace, between railing at darkness and discovering unexpected light. Some poems are brief, almost incantatory; others unfold as extended reflections on sin, grace, and the stubborn hope of renewal. What distinguishes this collection is its refusal to prettify suffering. Collins writes as someone who knows despair firsthand, and her readers become witnesses to a genuine spiritual struggle rather than beneficiaries of easy comfort. The work endures because it captures something universal in its specificity: the terror of feeling abandoned by God, and the terrifying act of continuing to reach toward divine love anyway.