Wheaton College Alumni Magazine Winter 2015 | Page 28

For
the
Blessing
of Souls
Unknown

A rare talent, wasted?
A lifetime of ministry,
forgotten?
Who was Lilias Trotter,
and why are a small band
of Wheaton alumni
determined
to preserve her art and
illumine her story?

by Katherine Halberstadt Anderson ’90

Above:
Lilias Trotter was a missionary, author, and artist.
Her written works inspired Helen Lemmel to write the hymn
“Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus.”
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W I N T ER  

2015

H

er diaries were stashed in a shed at Arab World Ministries. Her
journals lay wrapped in a feed sack in the attic of her grandnephew’s
home. Samples of her art were filed away at the Ashmolean Museum in
London. Nearly 70 years after her death, Lilias Trotter was well on her
way to obscurity . . . that is, until Miriam Huffman Rockness ’65 set out
to resurrect her memory.
It is thanks to Miriam, author of Lilias’ biography A Passion for the
Impossible (Discovery House Publishers, 2003), and a small band of
Wheaton College staff and alumni, that the legacy of this 19th-century
artist and missionary will not, like the unseen flower of Thomas Gray’s
famous elegy, “waste its sweetness on the desert air.”
Three of Lilias’ restored journals, a pocket sketchpad, and a larger
sketchbook from Venice may now be viewed at the College Archives &
Special Collections. Businessman Brian Oxley ’73, M.A. ’75 and his wife,
Sally Phillips Oxley ’74, who share an interest in rare books, recently
acquired the journals, currently on loan to Wheaton.