Ellen Lakshmi Goreh

Ellen Lakshmi Goreh (11 September 1853 – 1937) was an Indian poet, Christian missionary, deaconess, and nurse.

Early life Ellen Lakshmi Goreh was born in Varanasi, the daughter of Nilakantha (Nehemiah) Goreh and Lakshmibai Jongalekar. Her father was a Brahmin who converted to Christianity, and an ordained minister. Her mother died in 1853, and the infant Ellen was raised by white Westerners, including indigo planters named Smailes, and then by missionaries, Rev. and Mrs. W. T. Storrs, who called her "Nellie". She was educated in England from ages 12 to 27, including at Home and Colonial College in London.

Career Encouraged by English evangelist Frances Ridley Havergal, Goreh returned to India as a missionary in 1880. features poetry with Christian missionary themes, informed by Goreh's experience as an Indian woman among Westerners.

Goreh taught at a girls' school in Amritsar. She trained as a nurse at Allahabad, and became superintendent of the Bishop Johnson Orphanage from 1892 to 1900. She was ordained as a deaconess in 1897. Goreh's second collection of poems, titled simply Poems (1899), was published in Madras, and reflects "her radically transformed understandings" and "her intricate, multi-faceted identity" as an Indian Christian woman and a transracial adoptee. In 1932 she retired from mission work. "No Disappointment Yonder" (also titled "Over Yonder") "Lo, the Darkness Gathers Round Us" (also titled "Beacon-Light") "In the Secret of his Presence" The lyrics were treated to a musical setting by Australian composer Ernest Edwin Mitchell

Personal life Goreh died in 1937, in her eighties, at St. Catherine's Hospital in Kanpur.