Born in 1841 in Portsea, Hampshire, Sarah Doudney was the daughter of a candle and soap manufacturer, and the niece of David Alfred Doudney, an evangelical clergyman, and editor of The Gospel Magazine and Old Jonathan. She was educated at a school for French girls, and began writing at a young age, publishing her first piece - the song The Lesson of the Water-Mill, which would become quite popular in both Britain and the United States - in the Churchman's Family Magazine when she was fifteen.Doudney contributed poetry and fiction to periodicals such as Dickens's All the Year Round, the Churchman's Shilling Magazine, the Religious Tract Society's Girl's Own Paper, the Sunday Magazine, Good Words and the Quiver. She published her first novel, Under Grey Walls, in 1871, going on to pen approximately thirty-five more, many of them aimed at girls. Doudney is primarily remembered for her juvenile fiction, and for her hymns.
