Eliza W Farnham., an American philanthropist and author, born at Rensselaerville, Albany co., N. Y., Nov. 17, 1815, died in New York, Dec. 15, 1864. Her maiden name was Burhans. In 1835 she went to Illinois, and in 1836 married Thomas J. Farnham. In 1841 she returned to New York, where she visited prisons and lectured to women till the spring of 1844, when she became matron of the female department of the state prison at Sing Sing, hoping to govern such an institution by kindness alone. She remained four years, and while there published "Life in Prairie Land," and edited an edition of Sampson's "Criminal Jurisprudence." In 1848 she removed to Boston, and was connected for some time with the institution for the blind in that city. In 1849 she went to California, and in 1856 returned to New York, and published California Indoors and Out." For the next two years she studied medicine. In 1859 she organized a society to aid and protect destitute women in emigrating to the west, and went at different times to the western states with large numbers of such persons. The same year she published "My Early Days." She again visited California, and in 1864 published "Woman and her Era" (2 vols. 12mo, New York), a work on the position and rights of woman.

In 1865 appeared a posthumous work, The Ideal Attained." .