Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Discovery

Peel, Robert. Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Discovery. Vol. 1 of 3. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966.

Peel (1909-1992), college professor, literary critic, counter-intelligence officer, newspaperman and editorial consultant to the Christian Science Church, produced a three-volume biography of Mary Baker Eddy, of which “Discovery” is the first. Peel has “endeavored as a conscientious historian to give a straightforward, factual account free from either apologetics or polemics and from parti pris [biased] interpretations” (xi). Peel examines the intellectual and spiritual path of discovery leading the reader through Eddy’s life of obscurity and great loss, to her desperate search for health—from an examination of the much-debated episode with Phineas P. Quimby to Eddy’s 1866 pivotal healing and breakthrough to what she called the “Science of Christ” (55). What follows is her nine years of poverty, moving from house to house while writing what becomes her primary work, Science and Health, published in 1875. Complete with extensive footnotes and chronology, Peel brings historical insight to the political, cultural and religious context of Eddy’s life and development with exhaustive thoroughness. Peel’s next two volumes cover Eddy’s subsequent long life of writing, healing, publishing and building what she came to call ‘Christian Science’ and its church, up to her passing in 1910.

ISBN-10: 0875100856
ISBN-13 (Softcover): 978-0030866487
ISBN-13 (Hardcover): 978-0875100852

See also annotations:

Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Trial by Robert Peel (Volume 2 of 3)

Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Authority by Robert Peel (Volume 3 of 3)