cover image MARY BAKER EDDY: Speaking for Herself

MARY BAKER EDDY: Speaking for Herself

Mary Baker Eddy, MARY BAKER EDDY: Speaking for Herself

This edition containing two autobiographical writings inaugurates a new series of Eddy's unpublished writings. The two selections are Retrospection and Introspection, published in its final form in 1891, and Footprints Fadeless, composed in 1901-02 but published here for the first time. In the earlier memoir, Eddy ranges over remembered events in her life while at the same time turning inward to reflect on those events. She also defends herself against charges that she plagiarized one of her teachers, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby. Footprints Fadeless is less a memoir than it is Eddy's attempt to defend herself against a trenchant critic. Riess, PW's religion book editor, offers a splendid introduction that sets Eddy's life and work within late 19th-century American religion and society. Reminding us that Eddy was as much a woman of her time as a woman ahead of her time, Riess deftly draws a portrait of the 19th-century American religious and social currents in which Eddy swam. In addition, her introduction offers a helpful examination of spiritual autobiography and a discussion of the elements of the genre that Eddy's writings incorporate. These two memoirs provide a fresh glimpse of the founder of Christian Science. (Oct.)