Tributes have been paid to Elisabeth Elliot, whose first husband Jim was martyred with four other missionaries by the Auca Indians in 1956 and who became a noted author and speaker. She died yesterday at the age of 88.

Elliot was born in Belgium in 1926 to missionary parents and attended Wheaton College. She went to live in Ecuador as a missionary and there met Jim Elliot, whom she married in 1953. With Nate Saint, Roger Youderian, Ed McCully, and Pete Fleming, he was killed by Aucas after the group had made what they believed to be friendly contact with the isolated tribe. They had a 10-month-old daughter, Valerie.

Elisabeth Elliot continued to work in the region and eventually went to live with the tribe that had killed her husband, remaining for two years. She returned to the US in 1963 and in 1969 married Addison Leitch, professor of theology at Gordon Conwell Seminary in Massachusetts. He died in 1973 and she later married Lars Gren, with whom she shared her speaking and writing ministry for many years.

Elliot's books include the hugely influential Through Gates of Splendor, Shadow of the Almighty: The Life and Testimony of Jim Elliot, No Graven Image and The Savage My Kingsman.

In later years she experienced dementia. Steve Saint—son of Nate Saint, who was killed beside Jim Elliot—said on Facebook: "I think Elisabeth would be happy just being remembered as not much of a woman that God used greatly. To the rest of us mortals she was an incredibly talented and gifted woman who trusted God in life's greatest calamities, even the loss of her mind to dementia, and who allowed God to use her. He did use her.

"Tens of thousands of people will mourn her loss. I will certainly be one of them. But isn't it incredibly wonderful that our loss is certainly her gain."

Kay Warren, whose wife Rick is pastor of Saddleback Church, knew her well and wrote a tribute that concludes: "Elisabeth, thank you for shaping me into the woman I am, for modeling for me what it looks like to follow hard after Jesus, for never walking away from God in your darkest days and for holding true to your faith to the end."