● ● ●  in her role as the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, “bone and sinew of the world.”³

The Peel biography was, and is, no hagiography. It does not present Eddy as the flawless figure that earlier generations of her followers were accustomed to. It is a measure of the author’s honesty to his subject and his sources that, while critics sometimes considered the books too favorable, some church members criticized his portrayal for being exactly the opposite. Peel had “taken Mrs. Eddy from a pedestal,” as one member put it, adding that for her this more spiritually challenging perspective had “brought Mrs. Eddy alive.”⁴ A longtime Christian Science teacher and member of the Christian Science Board of Directors, Arthur Wuth, was both challenged and stirred after reading the manuscript of the second volume in 1971: “One cannot read these pages without gaining a far deeper appreciation of the struggles Mrs. Eddy endured to give to the world the Science of the Christ. It leaves me with a great desire to do more . . . to live the truths she demonstrated.”⁵

When I first met Robert Peel in the early 1970s I was a university student writing an undergraduate thesis on Eddy’s religious thought. My assigned reading included Edwin F. Dakin’s 1929 bestseller Mrs. Eddy: The Biography of a Virginal Mind, a sensational and, as later biographers have shown, highly fictional pop psychobiography.⁶ I came to Peel’s office with a list of factual questions on a number of the more extreme accusations put forth in Dakin’s account. Peel, who had asked similar questions himself as an undergraduate when the Dakin book came out, responded with genial understanding, patiently summarizing the historical background and documentary evidence on both sides. The trilogy’s extensive appendices and notes can do the same for a new generation of readers today.