Volume 47, Number 7 · April 27, 2000
Overachiever
By Caroline Fraser
Mary Baker Eddy
by Gillian Gill
Perseus, 713 pp., $35.00
Gillian Gill begins her admiring biography of Mary Baker Eddy with these seemingly ambiguous quotations from Mark Twain's 1907 book Christian Science, one of the most harshly critical works ever published about Eddy and the religion of faith healing she founded.[1] Twain skewers her singular character and compares her church to the monolithic corporation of his day, Standard Oil. Both Gill and Twain are right about this: Eddy's radical commitment to a system of belief as extreme as any ever conceived in America makes her one of the most electrifying, confounding figures in nineteenth-century women's history and in American religion.
Review, 5763 words
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