Ellen G. White

Ellen Gould Harmon was born on 26 November 1827 in Gorham, Maine, one of eight children and twin to a sister, Elizabeth. At nine years old she was struck in the face by a stone thrown by a classmate, an injury that kept her out of school for good and that she later described as the turn toward her religious life. In 1840, at twelve, her family joined the movement gathered around the preacher William Miller, who calculated from biblical prophecy that Christ would return around 1843 and then, revised, in October 1844.

Christ did not return, and the failure became known among Miller's followers as the Great Disappointment. Weeks later, in December 1844, Ellen experienced the first of what she and her fellow believers took to be a series of visions, this one showing the scattered Adventist believers still making their way toward the New Jerusalem. The vision gave the disheartened movement a reason to keep going, and it set Ellen, still a teenager, on a path as a recognized voice within it.

She married James Springer White in 1846, and together with James and a fellow Adventist preacher, Joseph Bates, she spent the following two decades gathering the scattered Millerite remnant into a single organized body. That work reached a formal conclusion in 1863 with the founding of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. She continued writing, traveling and shaping the young denomination, including several years establishing its work in Australia, until her death on 16 July 1915 at Elmshaven, her home in St. Helena, California.

Ellen White's published output ran to more than forty books and several thousand periodical articles over seventy years, and her grandson later called her the most translated woman author, of any kind, in the history of literature. Steps to Christ (1892) and The Desire of Ages (1898) reached readers well beyond Adventism, and The Great Controversy, first published in 1888 and revised in 1911, laid out the sweeping account of a cosmic conflict between good and evil that still shapes Adventist preaching.

A vision in June 1863 turned her attention to health, and from it grew a sustained call for vegetarian diet, temperance and rest that the church took seriously enough to build institutions around: the Battle Creek Sanitarium, later Loma Linda, now a university medical center, and Avondale College in New South Wales, which she helped establish during her years in Australia. The Seventh-day Adventist Church's own Fundamental Belief 18 states that her writings continue to speak with prophetic authority, offering guidance subordinate only to the Bible itself.

That authority has not gone unexamined. Historians, including some within the church, have documented substantial unattributed borrowing in her books from other religious writers of her time, a body of evidence the church has generally read as compilation under inspiration and outside scholars have generally read as evidence against a strictly original prophetic voice. The underlying facts of what she read and repeated are not seriously disputed; what they mean for her claim to prophetic authorship remains a live and unresolved argument.