Mary Baker Eddy

Gill, Gillian. Mary Baker Eddy. Reading, MA: Perseus Books, 1998.

Writing from a feminist perspective (as part of the Radcliffe Biography Series on “documenting and understanding the varied lives of women”), Gill, a historian and biographer, offers a fresh view of Mary Baker Eddy’s achievements, set in the light of the obstacles faced by women in her time. Gill also chronicles her own two-year struggle to gain access to the Church archives and thus acknowledges her reliance on the archival research performed by Robert Peel for his trilogy. As a result, her biography is an amplification of Peel’s research. What makes Gill’s biography unique is that she challenges the typical biographers’ view of Eddy as a hysterical invalid who abandoned her son and stole her ideas. Instead, Gill presents a “defense counsel’s brief” (xx) that acknowledges Eddy as being responsible for her ideas and achievements. Gill argues that Eddy’s accomplishments would not have been questioned if she had been a man. Although speculative at times, Gill stays faithful to her ‘brief’ and moves “beyond the stereotypes of Mary Baker Eddy as prophet or adventuress” presenting her “as a real woman with strengths and weaknesses, born in a specific time and place, and facing specific challenges and opportunities” (xxii).

ISBN-10: 0738202274
ISBN-13 (Softcover): 978-0738202273