| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Gillian Gill. Mary Baker Eddy. (Radcliffe Biography Series.) Reading, Mass.: Perseus. 1998. Pp. xxxv, 713. $35.00.

In the preface to this stellar biography of Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910), Gillian Gill, biographer of Agatha Christie and English translator of French feminist Luce Irigaray, reveals that she has become an admirer of her subject. She has grown, in fact, to have affection for the controversial founder of Christian Science, a religion, Gill says, she would have been hard put to write a sentence about before 1990. She was at that time simply looking for an interesting biographical subject. Upon deciding to write about Eddy, Gill quickly encountered three challenges. The first, common to all biographers of Eddy except Robert Peel, was difficulty in obtaining access to archival material held by the Mother Church of Christian Science in Boston. The second was previously written biographical accounts that have polarized public perceptions of Eddy as either a saintly instrument of God or a self-aggrandizing fake. Ironically, argues Gill, both poles converge on the assumption "that she deserved no personal credit for anything important she did" (p. xxi). The third was the lack of feminist scholarship about Eddy, which Gill attributes to the fact that Eddy did not follow the prescribed script for women who have survived the filtering process of history: suffragist, abolitionist, or temperance worker. Eddy, says Gill, rewrote the female plot. . . .

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