Customer Reviews

Mary Baker Eddy (Radcliffe Biography Series)

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1 star:		(2)

 

 

Ms Gill is not a Christian Scientist but you would suppose she has lived with her subject for a very long time. Her considerable forensic skills are just what her subject needs. In the sections dealing with P.P Quimby, the Misses Ware and Eddy's second husband Daniel Patterson, she contributes solid new material. Frequently she demolishes myths promulgated by the Mimine/Dakin/Braden biographies (and in a devastating appendix, analyses the motivations of these biographers). A new Mary Baker Eddy emerges, something of diamond in the rough but a diamond to be reckoned with, nonetheless. But if Ms Gill's objectivity is the result of not being a Christian Scientist, it also gives her book a problem. Her grasp of Christian Science theology is not...well, not complete. This leads, for example, to a very good joke about what Christian Science calls 'animal magnetism' but a joke based on a misconception nonetheless. Without a more complete understanding of Mrs Eddy's thinking, it is impossible for Ms Gill to provide a balanced view of her later years. The frenetic outward activity of Mrs Eddy's life in her eighties and even nineties is described minus the ballast of the spiritual mediation that made this activity possible. But this is still a very good book and a fun read. Ms Gill says Mrs Eddy would have enjoyed meeting Mark Twain. It's certain Mrs Eddy would have relished meeting Ms Gill.

I was so impressed by this book. In a way, it changed my life. I've read many, many biographies of Eddy, from Tomlinson to Peel to the newest one authorized by her church (Mary Baker Eddy: Christian Healer), and this was the first I could relate to directly. Others have been less than completely frank about Eddy's early life-they either idolize her or mock her. I was also fascinated to learn more details about Eddy's parents and siblings-with all their foibles and weaknesses. Gill's biography comes up to my standard of straightforward honesty, without either the apologetics of a follower or the sarcasm of a detractor. Gill weaves contextual information about life in the 1800s throughout her work, yet as a woman of the late 20th century, I found myself relating to Eddy and her struggle in so many ways. She was a single mom. She wrote romantic fiction and poetry. She lived through both widowhood and divorce. She had financial struggles, and, for a long time, no place to call home. She would get angry on occasion, yet she was also sublimely loving. She retained a girlish pleasure in clothes and fashion-she loved ice cream! Her life was not perfect, nor was she a perfect human being, yet she still rose to the heights of spiritual healer and religious leader-all in the face of intense opposition that would be difficult for anyone today, let alone a woman of her time period. Each challenge she faced was turned into an opportunity; each relationship that ended was grist for the mill of her own spiritual growth. As someone who is learning to practice spiritual healing, I found it inspiring to know that, if Eddy is any example, I don't have to be a perfect human being in order to get started. This shouldn't be the only biography one reads to get a complete composite of Mary Baker Eddy, but it's certainly an excellent foundation against which other information can be juxtaposed and evaluated. Of course, reading her seminal work, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, gets to the heart of her mission the fastest way of all.

Gill debunks the past so-called 'facts' of the inaccurate and false Milmine and others, traditions about an 'evil' Mary Baker Eddy. She includes a great Appendix to juxtapose these different biographies. She uncovers outright misogyny toward Mary Baker Eddy and the Christian Science Church's own error of a sugar coated mythologizeing of Mary Baker Eddy which doubtless, she would not have approved of herself, from all her own admonitions for others to stop being preoccupied with her personality.

She shows how the inaccurate information of a certain biographical tradition about Eddy, based in the beginnings of yellow journalism, served the interest of sensationalism of an early era of low class profit driven tabloid journalism - which even Willa Cather was later ashamed to admit she participated in, by evidence of her own last will and testament.

Gill makes Eddy human, which in no way detracts from her revelations as a religious discoverer and healer. You do not learn so much about Eddy's own personal preoccupation with healing, however, but you do learn why she felt the need to end suffering in her own life and others.

I loved the chapter on Mark Twain, whose daughter was healed in Christian Science; -- if you be sure to read all Gill's copious footnotes, you'll find this out. Gill sees Twain with more sophistication than those who would merely lump him against Mary Baker Eddy and uncovers his great ironic admiration through his ambivalence as a 19th century male (who must have felt some competition with her.)

It is a sober balance to the poor scholarship - where is serves Ms.Frasier's purposes - in her book, 'God's Perfect Child', which is a wholey different kind of book - a catharsis of the disenchanted and wounded feelings. Frasier has a right to her feelings about her experience but it is no excuse for really bad scholarship. She had a bone to pick and literalist fundamentalist parents (let it not be said that Christian Scientist's do not suffer from the same kind of fundamentalist stupidity of other religions) but she is certainly not the caliber of historical researcher as Gillian Gill. Frasier's inaccuracies will reinforce the minds who want to believe false myths about Eddy even if Gill takes the high road for true meticulous scholarship. Unfortunately since Fraziers's 19th century era research was so bad it makes me doubt much of what she says about her 20th century revelations.

As a third party and not a Christian Scientist, you get the feeling Gillian Gill came away admiring Mary Baker Eddy for what she was up against as a 19th century woman -- the 'cult of womanhood', and 'true womanhood' -- myths of her own era which tried to supress women through a fashionable and harmful glorification of physical weakness and illness. A time when a woman could not own her own children, speak in public, or hardly even own her own clothes. It was a time when a woman was 'one husband away from poverty.' So, how dare she,a woman, even contemplate writing about metaphysics when she lived in a time when she could barely even think about obtaining the higher education that might have equipped her better to write about her spiriaul discoveries! No wonder Mary Baker Eddy leaned on a 'Father-MOTHER,God'. How can you really understand Mary Baker Eddy fairly unless you can see her with her contemporaries? Gill starts us down that road.

Gill did not start off an admirer. She obviously feels for the predicaments of Eddy's situation and wanted to do her justice with all the bad scholarship and just plain lopsided hate for Eddy she found out there.

I can see Eddy (the forest) now, better for (the trees) all the previous bios on her. This lends balance and fairness to the landscape and I only hope Christian Scientists, out there, realize what a service this book does to the true life of 'the Discoverer, Founder, and Leader' as they call her, of their church.

[Brendan Gill, as one of the detractors, particularly needs to read Gill for his laughable ignorace about Eddy in his book 'Late Bloomers' put out by Artisan. He is pathetically innacurate and probably never cracked her work 'Science and Health' which is anything but what he calls 'voluminous'. He does all religious women professionals and leaders a disservice through his falling even far short of Twain in his oblique and obtuse misunderstanding of her.]

For far too long, Mary Baker Eddy has been worshiped by Christian Scientists and either castigated or ignored by nearly everyone else. Thanks to this long-needed biography, we now know that Eddy provides an inspiring model for mid to late life accomplishment. As biographer Gill puts it, she was "conventional in her 20s, weak in her 30s, struggling in her 40s, a social outcast in her 50s, indefatigably working in her 60s, famous in her 70s, formidable in her 80s." Over her long life, Eddy overcame ill health, poverty, widowhood, divorce, accusations of plagiarism, lawsuits, mockery and deception, in addition to the expected obstacles of being born poor, uneducated and female in the 19th century. Yet this woman became the most influential and controversial woman in America at the turn of the century. Her writings so challenged contemporary mores that her detractors expended massive amounts of energy producing -- or manufacturing -- damning facts and damaging documents. Over the years, men from Mark Twain to Noel Coward stooped to cheap shots, calling her, variously, shallow, stupid, egotistic, illiterate, illogical, uncultured, poorly read, incapable of love, painted, bedizened, affected, hysteric , paranoiac, mad, ambitious, mercenary, tyrannical, a man eater, a husband killer, a drug addict, a mesmerist, a plagiarist, and even, long after her death, "Hitler with no mustache." Unhappily, most feminists have been so blinded by Eddy's religion that they have failed to properly acknowledge much less honor her considerable courage and accomplishments. Thank you Gillian Gill for setting this straight.

All in all, not a bad effort. Admittedly, it was annoying at times to read the author's personal interjections within the body of the manuscript. But then I reasoned that Gill's effort here is largely a surveyed reassessment of all previous major works on Mrs. Eddy's life. As such, (and as she mentions repeatedly throughout the text), there is no point in her going over ground already covered in herculean fashion ala' Robert Peel. Unless Gill had new information on Mrs. Eddy previously unpublished or discussed, an exhaustive work would simply have been akin to reinventing the wheel. Better on an event-by-event basis (the most important ones, anyway) to reconsider some of Mrs. Eddy's more controversial and significant moves and this Gill does with reasonably good aplomb. The author's take on Mrs. Eddy as the proverbial twenty-first century woman trapped in a repressive, nineteenth century Victorian society should play well with a number of women today (particularly those who find themselves divorced, widowed, homeless, raising children on their own, or single by choice). That may sound like a cynical statement to some, but it's not meant to be. It simply may be the best way for MBE to 'fit in' with this age. That being said, I still feel there is a great deal about Mrs. Eddy that Gill misses capturing or simply glances over in an effort to get to more juicy details (the chapter on the plot to murder Daniel Spofford, while entertaining, I thought to be a bit much). Nothing, I suppose, sells so well about Mrs. Eddy than controversy.

This is not a light book--in tone or weight! However, it gave me a rich, deep, understanding of Mary Baker Eddy as a person and as a figure in history--plus many hours of reading pleasure.

Most well-researched biographies are dry and factual. Ms. Gill has managed to organize an unusual life into chapters that are more than chronological slices. Step by step, she takes the reader through the development of Ms. Eddy's thought and philosophy. At the same time, we learn a huge amount of Ms. Eddy as a literary, spiritual, and political leader.

If you buy this book, please don't neglect to read the footnotes. Ms. Gill has packed them with tons of interesting trivia that otherwise would have cluttered up her well-turned prose. This is a rare and valuable work--one that should become the standard starting place for any serious student of either the Christian Science movement or of women's role in the late 19th century. I hope that Ms. Gill will receive the time and resources to complete other projects, such as this one.

I have read a number of biographies about Mary Baker Eddy and this is probably one of the best. Don't skip the footnotes! They are long but well worth reading. I kept one bookmark in the book and another in the footnotes. A few parts that I really enjoyed was learning more about Mary Baker Eddy's life before her discovery of Christian Science. There seems to be very little reliable information on this time period and Gillian Gill fills this void. I also enjoyed reading about the Next Friends case. Gillian Gill seems to have gone further than any previous biographer and actually read what seems to be practically everything on this subject - from newspaper clippings in Lynn, court transcripts, letters between the individuals filing the lawsuit, and more. It is the clearest explanation of the lawsuit I have ever read. And on top of this, I have a little clearer idea of what life must have been like for women in the 1800s - whether you writing a book about the Bible and healing or not.

I agree with the person who said that this book is probably better for non-Christian Scientists. On the positive side, it MAY help to undo some of the damage done by dishonest authors and may inspire others to investigate further the life of the greatest discoverer of our age.

An honest look at what Mrs. Eddy "had to meet" is necessary and parallel to one's own progress in Christian Science, because she met it all. This context is hard to grasp for "non-Scientists" of course. No one who begins to understand Christian Science could miss the idea that Mrs. Eddy's experience was not "sugar-coated." But that's just the beginning, or rather the beginning of the beginning. It wasn't human effort, and it wasn't a magic wand. Ms. Gill's biography barely begins to convey what she went through, other than the social constrictions of the era. This understanding of what she did and how she did it, has to run parallel with one's growing understanding of Christian Science, or one is not understanding it.

A person more familiar with the teachings of Christian Science will want more spiritual perspective, and be mindful of what Mrs. Eddy herself says, in her own autobiography, "Retrospection and Introspection," that the mere recital of the events of a life without providing its spiritual nexus -- (I'm paraphrasing)-- is meaningless. .

Although I was endeavoring to respect the author's intentions of being fair, when I got to the end, it was like a big "clunk". I felt like, where was God in all of this? Where is the sense of how God was working in Mrs. Eddy's life? (If this is what they mean by "sugar-coating", then give me the sugar-coating every time.)

"Biographies" are meaningful only according to the degree that they convey the correct sense of an individual's character. You can't begin to understand Mrs. Eddy until you begin to understand Christian Science. As she so succintly put it: The individual and his ideal can never be severed."

Another book that students of Christian Science who think of themselves as "feminists" might find interesting is Paul Smillie's "Mary Baker Eddy:
The Historical and Prophetic Perspective", available from The Gethsemane Foundation. It has a lot of thought-provoking ideas. Also good is David Keyston's "The Healer," a concise volume illustrating how Mrs. Eddy practiced what she preached.

Regarding biographies of Mary Baker Eddy in general, please see my review of Bliss Knapp's "Destiny of the Mother Church."

Biographers of Eddy have assumed she was an ordinary woman in possession of an astonishing achievement and success. This strikes Gill as an absurdity. Surely her talent must account for her achievement. Mary Baker Eddy's freedom from domestic care was won at enormous cost when she was separated from her six year old son. She lived with her second husband, Daniel Patterson, in North Groton, New Hampshire between 1855 and 1860. After 1862 she began a transition. By 1875 she was active and independent. She first consulted Quimby, a healer, in 1862. Both Quimby and Mary Baker Eddy were autodicts. Mary Baker Eddy suffered from life-long loneliness. During the Civil War Daniel Patterson had the look of a fool and a failure because he was captured by the rebel forces while he was, remarkably, sight-seeing. The situation encouraged Mary to take an independent stand. For such an undertaking good health was requisite. Under the ministrations of P.P. Quimby she was healed. She became a Quimby disciple and publicist. She made several visits to Portland, Maine between 1863 and 1865. Quimby published nothing in his lifetime. He was barely literate. The Quimby papers were, in all probability, transcriptions of Quimby dictations. Quimby died in 1866. Eddy's healing in 1866 after a fall on the ice, as her marriage was collapsing, was produced through Bible reading. It was a turning point.

Between 1866 and 1870 Mrs. Eddy moved nine times. She was penniless. Hiram Crafts was MBE's first student. While living with Mrs. Webster she met Richard Kennedy and Sarah Bagley. In 1870 MBE and Richard Kennedy moved to Lynn. Kennedy was a healer and MBE a teacher. The early students, except for Putney Bancroft, were a source of endless trouble to Eddy. By 1872 Kennedy had declared his independence. Nearly all of the Eddy-Kennedy correspondance has disappeared. SCIENCE AND HEALTH appeared in print in 1875. Many revisions took place in the foundational text, finally issued for posterity in 1907. MBE underwent social ostracism and cultural and intellectual isolation. She was writing alone in a cultural vacuum. Gill characterizes the work as the loneliest book she has encountered.

The author of the biography functions as a sort of counsel to the defense as she evaluates MBE's essential intergrity and authenticity. She separates the strands of the rival schools of biographers, Milmine-Dakin-Dittemore versus Peel-Wilbur. Asa Gilbert Eddy and Mary Baker Glover, (after separating from Patterson she resumed using the Glover surname), were married January 1, 1877. Gilbert proved to be very useful. He died June 3, 1882. In August 1882 Calvin Frye was offered employment by Mrs. Eddy at her Massachusetts Metaphysical College. His employment with her extended to the end of her life in 1910. Calvin Frye had grown up in the shadow of his mother's insanity.

Mrs. Eddy's religion succeeded as she created a persona appealing to both the rich financier and the aspiring artisan. John Wilson, University Press, became the printer of SCIENCE AND HEALTH to the great betterment of the book in its subsequent editions. Between 1885 and 1891 some editorial services were provided by James Henry Wiggin, a Unitarian minister. Gill argues that SCIENCE AND HEALTH is a flawed but fascinating and radical work. Mary Baker Eddy was unschooled but brilliant. By the end of the 1880's Christian Science was a religious force. It was challenged by the New Thought Movement.

In 1889 Mrs. Eddy moved from Boston to New Hampshire and thereafter appeared in public infrequently. She closed the Metaphysical College and other Christian Science institutions underwent reorganization. In 1892 the Mother Church was established. The building of the church on Norway Street was completed in eight months. Joseph Armstrong wrote interestingly of the building of the church and the extension. The directors supplied on-site supervision of the work. Part of Mrs. Eddy wanted to be entertained and adored. There was, for example, her adopted son Ebenezer Foster. Unfortunately Foster exploited his influence. This biographer identifies one of the problems in Mrs. Eddy's dealings with others is that she hated noise. Pleasant View was a garden and a farm. In her first decade at Concord she enjoyed relative anonymity. In the nineteenth century New Hampshire was a tourist mecca.

A rigid household routine enabled Mrs. Eddy to cope with uneven progress in Christian Science affairs. In her pursuit of domestic perfection Mrs. Eddy may have been a little mad. Household workers learned to fear her anger. Mrs. Eddy taught her last Christian Science class in 1898. Students received special invitations to join the gathering in Concord. In 1906 the New York WORLD reported that Mrs. Eddy was more dead than alive. Her reclusiveness puzzled friends and family. The citizens of Concord were prepared to combat the press attacks. After the Next of Friends law suit Mrs. Eddy moved to Chestnut Hill, (to a great barn of a place, she said). Within three weeks the rooms were reduced to the dimensions of those at Pleasant View and the dwelling became more tailored to Mrs. Eddy's needs. In the end Mrs. Eddy and her followers dealt with Josephine Woodbury and Augusta Stetson, errant leaders of the movement.

Gillian Gill finds that Eddy was not an hysteric, a drug-addict, or deficient in maternal feelings. Acts to change the structure of the religion undertaken subsequent to 1889 are called amusingly the great disestablishment by Gill. Notes, source book descriptions, and an index follow the epilogue in this accomplished and judicious retelling of the life of Mary Baker Eddy.

The Gillian Gill biography of Mary Baker Eddy is eminently worthwhile reading for any student of Christian Science, of historical figures, or of the art of writing. Gill herself is not a Christian Scientist. Moreover, the book was sponsored by Radcliffe College as part of its Radcliffe Biography Series, which Radcliffe's president characterizes as "an expression of the value we see in documenting and understanding the varied lives of women." The resulting feminist gloss evident in this book, presented from the viewpoint of one outside the Christian Science movement, provides a very different perspective on Mary Baker Eddy's life than that offered by other Eddy biographies.

Gill approaches her task with a thoroughly sincere, perhaps even reverent respect for her subject. As if to illustrate why such respect is both deserved and overdue, Gill notes in her Preface that Mary Baker Eddy is not even mentioned in the 1993 essay of feminist historian Gerda Lerner, "One Thousand Years of Feminist Bible Criticism." Even the casual observer will recognize the absurdity of omitting, from such an essay, a woman who founded an international religious movement based on reinterpretation of the Bible. Lerner's essay notwithstanding, feminism, as a philosophical ally of liberalism, has routinely given religion short shrift and Gill's Eddy biography thus helps to fill this gaping void in feminist scholarship.

Gill's feminist perspective is an occasional distraction, but she more than compensates with her paramount emphasis on careful scholarship and a fluid prose that leaves one almost unaware of the reading. The mix of feminism and the viewpoint of a non-Christian Scientist is frequently evident, and usually, but not always, the mix produces entirely appropriate results. Thus, when Gill describes the original 1894 Church she speaks of a "womblike structure" that "seems to gather [her] in." It strikes her as "a deeply female space." It is unlikely perceptive observations such as these would occur to one whose intellectual moorings were in traditional culture rather than in feminist theory.

On the other hand, when Gill speaks of widowhood, not her subject's widowhood but widowhood in general terms, her concern is solely that it leaves women "uncomfortably dependent on the goodwill of [their] family," and she notes that Mary Baker Eddy was fortunate to have received an important "lesson in survival" from her grandmother's many years of widowhood. Gill's feminist inclinations apparently blind her to a broader context of widowhood: although in some cases it leaves a woman "uncomfortably dependent," in all cases it leaves a man dead. Unless one is prepared to argue that death is preferable to uncomfortable dependence as a state of being, one would have to acknowledge that it was the men of the 19th century, more than the women, who needed but were denied "lessons in survival." They are, after all, the ones who didn't survive. While much more in a similar vein could be cited, the obviously careful scholarship behind this book, and its admirably readable prose, more than compensate for such minor distractions.

One of the more interesting and informative aspects of Gill's work is the careful attention given to other Eddy biographers and commentators. Gill is forthright and thorough in discussing them and pulls no punches in disagreements with them, especially those who are hostile to Mary Baker Eddy. From Milmine/Cather to Clemens to Peel, all come under Gill's careful and unflinching scrutiny. Gill herself is not uniformly kind to Eddy; however, from all appearances she does strive to be true to the historical record. She is completely justified in suggesting one cannot say that in good conscience about several other Eddy biographers.

Beginning, as one would expect, with the birth of Mary Baker in Bow, New Hampshire, Gill ends her story describing the view from the site of Mrs. Eddy's New Hampshire home, Pleasant View, looking toward the Bow hills. She thus encloses and gathers in her subject in a distinctly maternal way, perhaps not unlike what she experienced on visiting the Mother Church. Just as the product of Mary Baker Eddy's work, coming down through the years, had enveloped Gill, the product of Gill's work similarly envlopes Eddy. It may be saying too much to suggest that this mutuality is an important dynamic of the book, a seeming flow of respect and esteem coursing between the author and her historical subject. Such mutuality is consistent, however, with a central theme of equity-feminist scholarship: paying homage to female historical figures who, in their time and through their work, similarly paid homage to the generations of women who would come after them.

Between the beginning and end, Gill is no less a nurturing and caring mother to her historical subject, protective, proud and understanding, and in the end willing to acknowledge its faults as she sees them, and yet grant it unconditional acceptance. These are among the qualities that make this a biography well worth reading.