About the Book The great missionary biographies are the records of incompleted lives. May it not be that the influence exerted by the record is the completion of the work that seemed to be prematurely laid down? David Brainerd died at the age of thirty, Henry Martyn at thirty-two, Keith Falconer at thirty-one, Mackay at forty one. There are biographies of older men-Livingstone, Judson, Patteson, French-which have powerfully affected men, but a disproportionate number of the effective books have dealt with short lives. This life of Irene Petrie is another illustration of this fact. She spent four years in missionary service and died at the very beginning of her work. It was one more incomplete life awaiting fulfillment in the lives of men and women who will take up the work which she loved and served, through the holy persuasion of her example and spirit.
Irene Petrie was one of the first representatives of the missionary movement among students to fall in the forefront of foreign missions. The call I came to her in 1891 and in 1893 she sailed for India. In 1897 she passed away at Leh in the Himalayas. Here is the first biography of a student Volunteer.
About the Author Mary Louisa Georgina Petrie (birth date unknown) was born in Yorktown, Surrey, England, to Colonel Martin Petrie and his wife Eleanora Grant Macdowall Petrie. She was educated and received her B.A. from University College in London. In the late 19th century she founded and edited a magazine entitled The College by Post in addition to publishing numerous articles in a variety of popular, Christian, and women's journals and newspapers. During her career she published nine books on missionary activity and Bible study and delivered several hundred lectures and speeches. Her book, Clews to the Holy Writ, published in 1892, promoted the novel scheme of studying the Bible in its historical order. She wrote Irene Petrie: Missionary to Kashmir, 1900, a biography of her only sister who died while on a missionary journey. Mary Petrie married Charles Ashley Carus Wilson, a professor in Montreal, in 1892. Thereafter she used the name Mrs C Ashley Carus-Wilson on all her publications with the exception of The Sunday at Home, on which she used the name Helen Macdowall. Macdowall was the name of her mother's family. Charles and Mary Carus-Wilson had three children, Louis, Martin, and Eleanora, of which only Martin and Eleanora survived her death. Mary Louisa Georgina Petrie Carus-Wilson died on November 19, 1935 leaving to her children the home in Kensington that she inherited from her father.
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