The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science
Book by Georgine Milmine and Willa Cather / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science (1909) is a highly critical account of the life of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, and the early history of the Christian Science church in 19th-century New England. It was published as a book in November 1909 in New York by Doubleday, Page & Company.[1][2] The original byline was that of a journalist, Georgine Milmine, but a 1993 printing of the book declared that novelist Willa Cather was the principal author; however, this assessment has been questioned by more recent scholarship which again identifies Milmine as the primary author, although Cather and others did significant editing.[3] Cather herself usually wrote that she did nothing more than standard copy-editing,[4] but sometimes that she was the primary author.[5]
Author |
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Country | United States |
Genre | Biography, history |
Publisher |
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Pages | 566 (first edition) |
ISBN | 0-8032-6349-X |
OCLC | 150493 |
Website | Text available at the Internet Archive |
One of the first major examinations of Eddy's life and work, along with Sibyl Wilbur's articles in Human Life magazine, the material initially appeared in McClure's magazine in 14 installments between January 1907 and June 1908,[6] when Eddy was 85 years old, preceded in December 1906 by a six-page editorial in which McClure's announced the series as "probably as near absolute accuracy as history ever gets".[7] In the early 20th century, Christian Science became the fastest growing religion in America,[8] and in the view of McClure's, Eddy was the most powerful woman in the country.[9] The McClure's eyewitness accounts and affidavits became key primary sources for many accounts of Eddy and the church's early history.[10][4]
The magazine's publisher and editor-in-chief, S. S. McClure, assigned three writers to work on the articles in addition to Cather and Milmine: William Henry Irwin, McClure's managing editor; and staff writers Burton J. Hendrick and Mark Sullivan. Briefly, the famed journalist Ida Tarbell was assigned to the project but left the magazine before it started.[11] The 1909 book was republished by Baker Book House in 1971 after its copyright had expired, and again in 1993 by the University of Nebraska Press, this time naming both Cather and Milmine as authors. David Stouck, in his introduction to the University of Nebraska Press edition, wrote that Cather's portrayal of Eddy "contains some of the finest portrait sketches and reflections on human nature that Willa Cather would ever write".[12]
A review in The New York Times wrote in 1910 that the book's evidence against "Eddyism" was "unanswerable and conclusive".[13] However, more recent scholarship has questioned the accuracy and trustworthiness of the series and book.[14][15][16][17] In 2017, scholar L. Ashley Squires wrote: "Christian Science remains poorly understood by the broader scholarly community and the public as a whole. One need only look to the frustratingly enduring usage of the 1907 McClure’s biography as an authoritative source ... for evidence of scholarly ignorance."[17]