Mary Baker Eddy - Biographies of Eddy

Biographies of Eddy

• A well footnoted (scholarly) biography which eventually became a church-authorized biography of Eddy is Robert Peel's trilogy Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Discovery (ISBN 0030575559), Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Trial (ISBN 0875101186), and Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Authority (ISBN 003021081X). (1966–1971)
• A more recent single volume is another originally independent, but now church-authorized and still controversial, 1999 work by a non-Christian Scientist, Gillian Gill (ISBN 0-7382-0227-4). Gill's work included a review of numerous other Eddy biographies over the years. She also uncovered evidence that Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, from whom critics have long-claimed Eddy stole all her ideas, could not possibly have been the "author" of the so-called "Quimby Manuscripts" as Horatio Dresser, the son of two of Quimby's students, claimed. Gill wrote that Quimby's actual manuscripts, in his own almost illegible handwriting, indicated that for all intents and purposes Quimby was functionally illiterate and could not write a single cogent English paragraph let alone the manuscripts. She also uncovered materials that demonstrated that Dresser intentionally left out all manuscripts that would have demonstrated the independence of Eddy's ideas from Quimby's.
• See also Stephen Gottschalk, Rolling Away the Stone, Mary Baker Eddy's Challenge to Materialism, (ISBN 0-253-34673-8) for a new account of her founding the church and relations to critics such as Mark Twain. (Indiana University Press: 2006)
• A more recent book which focuses on the healings of Mary Baker Eddy and her letters to students is Mary Baker Eddy: Christian Healer by Yvonne Cache von Fettweis and Robert Townsend Warneck, 1998 (ISBN 978-0875103747 or "Amplified Edition", 2009, ISBN 0-87510-479-7).
• Mary Baker Eddy, Speaking for Herself (ISBN 0-87952-275-5)
• Willa Cather and Georgine Milmine The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science (1993) began as a famous magazine series 1907–08 and critical book in 1909.
• Doris and Moris Grekel also wrote three-part non church-authorized biography on Eddy, The Discovery of the Science of Man: (1821–1888), (ISBN 1-893107-23-X), The Founding of Christian Science: The Life of Mary Baker Eddy 1888–1900, (ISBN 1-893107-24-8), and The Forever Leader: (1901–1910) (ISBN 0-9645803-8-1). This biography was aimed at serious students of Christian Science as opposed to the general public.
• Former Church treasurer and clerk, John V. Dittemore teamed up with Ernest Sutherland Bates, in 1932, to write a biography, Mary Baker Eddy – The Truth and the Tradition. Most of the prose was written by Bates and Dittemore would later distance himself from the book. It has some genuinely distinct information including a list of Eddy's students taught at the Massachusetts Metaphysical College.
• The famous Viennese novelist Stefan Zweig wrote a biography "The Mental Healers: Mesmer, Freud, Mary Baker Eddy." Original in German: "Die Heilung durch den Geist: Mesmer, Freud, Mary Baker Eddy." Zweig based his book solely on the Milmine biography (above) and after consultation with Sigmund Freud, concluded that Eddy was a madwoman.
• Dakin, Edwin Franden (1929), Mrs. Eddy: The Biography of a Virginal Mind, London: Charles Scribner's Sons, pp. 558, http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=3772032
• Martin Gardner, The Healing Revelations of Mary Baker Eddy, Prometheus Books, 1993.