This slim volume contains prayers for ever possible occasion. As the subtitle states, "for all conditons of woman's life." Thus, there are daily prayers, according to the day of the week, or the Sabbath or the Festivals, as wll as for certain times of the year, i.e. on the New Moon, or during the month of Elul (prior to the High Holy Days). There are also specific prayers for a loved one who is ill, or prior to giving birth, as well as for matrimonial happiness, prayer before a son or daughter getting married, etc.

Fanny Neuda, nee Schmiedl, was born in 1819 in the Moravian town of Ivancice, which was then part of Austria. She married Abraham Neuda, a progressive rabbi known for both his talmudic scholarship and his secular knowledge, and they lived in Lostice, Moravia, for nearly two decades, until the rabbi’s death in 1854 at age 42.

A widow at 35, Neuda published her prayers in 1855. After that, history loses track of Neuda until her death in Merano, Italy, in 1894. “Hours of Devotion,” meanwhile, became wildly popular. Written in the vernacular, it joined a large market of prayer books for women that was thriving by the mid-1800s. Like other collections at the time, “Hours of Devotion” was composed of techinot, or supplications, whose intimate pleas were often whispered from the women’s galleries of European synagogues where men prayed in Hebrew. “Hours of Devotion,” however, was the first such book to be written for a woman by a woman, and it attracted a legion of admirers. It was reprinted more than a dozen times, and it was so cherished that during the Holocaust, some Jewish women reportedly smuggled copies of the book into concentration camps.