1846 MARY LUNDIE DUNCAN. Horatius Bonar's Sister-in-Law and Female Counterpart of M'Cheyne's Young Death & Piety.

A rather rare first American edition of the Memoir of Mrs. Mary Lundie Duncan. Inexplicably rare today, it is truly a primary text of 19th-century Scottish evangelical pietism and revivalism.

Mary Lundie Duncan (1814–1840) was a devout pastor’s wife, poet, and hymn writer, best known for authoring the enduring child’s prayer hymn "Jesus, Tender Shepherd, Hear Me." She died prematurely at age twenty-five. Her life and immediate family were intricately connected to the inner circle of the 1830s and 1840s evangelical awakening in Scotland. Her younger sister, Jane Catherine Lundie, married the famous hymn writer and theologian Horatius Bonar, making Mary the sister-in-law to one of the central leaders of the Free Church of Scotland and the nineteenth-century revival movement. Furthermore, the Lundie family maintained close spiritual and ministerial ties with Robert Murray M'Cheyne, whose legendary ministry in Dundee exemplified the passionate, experiential pietism, intense personal prayer life, and evangelistic fervor that defined Scottish Presbyterian revivalism during this period. 

[Horatius Bonar, Robert Murray M'Cheyne, Scottish Free Church] Memoir of Mrs. Mary Lundie Duncan, being Recollections of a Daughter by Her Mother. New York. Robert Carter. 1846. First American Edition. 310pp.

Good - in original cloth, cocked, foxed and handled, though generally sound. Cloth chipped and worn, rubbed through at extremities. Rear lower corner of board with deterioration and losses. Textually very solid.