Women of History: Alice Sibley

Alice M. Sibley (1865–1939) played a brief but significant role in the life of Mary Baker Eddy. When still very young, Sibley was instrumental in helping the founder of the new Church of Christ, Scientist, surmount a time of great loss during the summer of 1882, following the death of her husband Asa Gilbert Eddy on June 3.

Not only did Eddy overcome the struggle; she emerged stronger for it, setting the stage for an important period of progress in establishing her church. As biographer Robert Peel noted, “Although the crisis she had passed through recently might have been expected to slow her progress, it seems instead to have shot her forward.”¹

In a state of profound grief, Eddy made plans in July to leave Boston for Barton, Vermont, and the family home of her student Arthur T. Buswell. She wanted a companion for her travels, and turned to the 17-year-old Sibley. “Can you will you go with me,” she asked in a July 4 letter. “I need a female with me nights I feel it is hardly safe for me to go alone if you can go with me please be ready on the morrow if possible I have no one to hope in at this hour.”²

Sibley agreed, traveling to Vermont and keeping Eddy company for the month they spent there.

And she proved to be the right person to aid the leader of Christian Science in her prayerful struggle. Eddy wrote to Clara Choate on July 16, saying that she “hovered round me like a flower of light.”³ Three days later she wrote to Julia Bartlett, noting that Sibley was “very comforting with her merry manners and kind heart.”⁴.

Buswell later remembered the time:

“…[Eddy’s] great struggle was known to his household, but…she carried it through alone, though they often watched outside her door. After a night of agony, she would emerge from her struggle with a radiant face and luminous eyes, and they would hesitate to speak to her for fear of disturbing the peace that enveloped her.”⁵

The home of John C. Buswell, Barton, Vermont, circa 1879. P05334. During her time in Barton, Mary Baker Eddy directed people to write to her at the post office, care of J. C. Buswell; it is therefore likely, although not confirmed, that this was where she and Alice Sibley stayed in the summer of 1882.

Sibley was born in Boston, the daughter of an emery cloth manufacturer. Lucretia S. Brown, Eddy’s early student and a family friend, introduced her to Christian Science, probably by taking her to hear Eddy speak. She had begun writing Eddy in 1879, at the age of 14. The first letter in our collection, written on April 26, 1879, mentions that Christian Science freed her from pain in the side and headache.⁶ Eddy responded on May 1, recognizing Sibley’s interest in her healing system by noting an important receptivity: “The interest you have in Metaphysics is owing to your unsullied mind, your thoughts are open to the light, and turn as naturally as the flower in the direction whence the light comes.”⁷

Eddy was known to have a special fondness for children and young people, and cared deeply about their spiritual development. In another letter dated March 5, 1881, she expressed her affection for Sibley, describing her as “my naughty wild girl wayward in goodness impulsive as the March wind and sunny as the flowers.”⁸

On their return to Boston from Vermont, Sibley studied Christian Science with Eddy at the Massachusetts Metaphysical College. Later that year, she wrote to Eddy about treating a sore throat through prayer. Eddy gave her this counsel in a December 13, 1882 letter: “A good hugging and a little common real sense on this occasion is the only recipe for a hallucination such as you (I am sorry to say) are at present laboring under.”⁹

For reasons that remain unclear, Sibley’s friendship with Eddy, and her involvement in Christian Science, ended in 1883, at the insistence of her family, who had not embraced the religion. That summer, Eddy wrote to Sibley’s mother, Mary G. Sibley, on August 28 1883 and noted her daughter’s affection: “…As her attachment increased you told me it was nothing strange for her to feel so, that she had manifested just such enthusiasm in friendship for some of her teachers, that you thought it once made her sick parting for a short time with one of them.”¹⁰

Sibley went on to work for decades as a Boston schoolteacher. Unlike some of Eddy’s associates she did not write a reminiscence. However, her correspondence with Eddy is available at mbepapers.org.

Alice Sibley helped Mary Baker Eddy through one of her darkest hours, after which Eddy made great strides in furthering the cause of Christian Science. Back in Boston, she was soon teaching classes again, and within the year would begin the Journal of Christian Science (known today as The Christian Science Journal).